I once saw Villiers in a tube train at Victoria Station. I looked into the tube and saw him sitting by a window. He seemed pale, gaunt and lined. I was about to board the train when the doors closed. This was in 1997. He died several months later.
9 Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters, edited by John Coldstream.
10 Michael Fitzgerald, quoted in the New York Times, 10 June 1984.
Chapter 18
1 This reminds me of Kirk Douglas’s story, perhaps apocryphal, noted in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, on casting for the movie The Defiant Ones, about two chained escaped prisoners, one white, the other black. According to Douglas, Robert Mitchum refused to act with a black guy and Marlon Brando would only agree IF he played the black man.
2 Lord Attenborough’s 1965 letter to Finney, offering him the part of Gandhi, was one of many items auctioned by Bonham’s in 2015.
3 Jon Blair interview with the author, 19 October 2015.
4 Finney has little record of political involvement. But, in 1975, he had led a delegation, which included Peggy Ashcroft and Clement Freud, to Downing Street to launch a petition against the imposition of VAT on theatre tickets. Labour Chancellor Denis Healey met them outside the door to Number 11.
In October 1976, Finney protested outside the South African Embassy, alongside Sheila Hancock, Eileen Atkins, Robert Morley, Kenneth Haigh and Kenneth Williams, to demand the release of Winston Ntshona and John Kani, two black South African actors known for their work in Britain, who had been detained in South Africa after their appearance in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead. Equity, the actors’ union, sent a telegram to John Vorster, the South African Prime Minister, asking him to order the immediate release of Kani and Ntshona, who were both Equity members. The two actors were subsequently released. (Ntshona and Kani later played roles in The Wild Geese.)
Fugard subsequently wrote to The Times to praise London’s theatrical community. ‘I do not have the slightest doubt that these protests secured the release of my two friends,’ he said.
Chapter 19
1 Thirty years on and Hampstead Theatre has been revamped and has capacity for at least 400 theatregoers.
2 Author’s interview with Michael Attenborough, 30 March 2016.
3 Lyle Kessler interview with the author, 22 October 2015.
4 Kevin Rigdon interview with the author, November 2015.
5 Nan Cibula-Jenkins interview with the author, 31 October 2015.
6 The movie version of Orphans did not rival the play’s commercial success. It is described by Brewer’s Cinema as ‘one of Hollywood’s worst ever flops, comparing budget to box office’.
7 Graham Benson interview with the author, 24 October 2015.
Chapter 20
1 The only other possible contender for the part, after Wilson’s death, was actor Richard Jenkins. As Jenkins tells it, ‘I auditioned for Miller’s Crossing, and my agent called me up and said, “I’ve got great news, it’s between you and Albert Finney.” I said, “Oh really, that’s great. Who would you choose?” And of course, Albert was wonderful in it.’
2 The Coen Brothers’ Interviews, edited by William Rodney Allen.
3 Alex Simon interview with Gabriel Byrne in 2009.
4 Interview with Dennis Haskins on Daily Actor, 20 October 2009.
5 Journey: A Personal Odyssey by Marsha Mason.
6 Laurence Olivier once told Derek Jacobi, ‘You’ve got to learn how to take the call as you gain a lot by doing a wonderful curtain call.’
Chapter 21
1 Albert Finney in Character by Quentin Falk.
2 Quote from theatregoer Dean Atkinson: ‘When I was a student we went to see him [Finney] in Reflected Glory. We waited at the stage door for him and he spent so much time with us chatting and signing autographs.’
3 A Patriot For Us – John Heilpern’s biography of John Osborne.
4 Osborne was known for his invective; by his standards this was a mild mauling.
5 Carolyn Seymour, interview with the author, 3 December 2015.
6 LA Times profile, 28 February 1993.
7 Mike Figgis, interview with the author, 1 October 2015.
8 Quoted in The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia by Laurence Raw.
Chapter 22
1 Suri Krishnamma, interview with the author, 16 December 2015.
2 Just Representations by Robert Gardner.
3 This was for Nostromo. But the series did not actually air until January 1997.
Chapter 23
1 A Fart in a Colander: The Autobiography, Roy Hudd.
2 The Independent profile of Finney by Terry Coleman, 26 January 1997.
3 Agnieszka Holland, interview with the author, 5 November 2015.
Chapter 24
1 The first choice to play Yvan was Michael Gambon but producer David Pugh said that Christopher Hampton, who adapted the play into English from the original French, took so long to finish – eighteen months in total – that they lost Gambon to a Broadway play.
British actors, to judge from the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that characterised the Broadway staging of Art, are still more down-to-earth and amenable. American producers wanted some starry players, at least ones to rival Finney and Courtenay, when the play opened in New York in 1998. Lengthy discussions revolved around the possibility of ‘the big three’ – Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel – leading the run. But, according to producer David Pugh, ‘They wanted cars from the theatre. They’d only do six performances a week. They wanted seat prices to go to $100.’ Compare this to Finney and Courtenay, who made no fancy demands and always insisted that Stott be paid the same as them, a relatively humble £3,000 a week. In the end, the Broadway production of Art opened with Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina.
2 Ken Stott interview in the Guardian, 9 February 1999.
3 National Service: Diary of a Decade at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre.
4 Managing My Life: My Autobiography by Alex Ferguson.
5 From Ken Wilson’s blog, 14 August 2010.
6 Ken Wilson bumped into Finney again a couple of years later while walking in central London, ‘And he recognised me from the night backstage and asked me what I was doing. (I was waiting for a co-author before a meeting at Macmillan’s London office.) He asked what kind of writing and I explained about ELT course books. Albert was with two other people and they were clearly late for an appointment of some kind, but we talked for about five minutes – about writing books for English learners!!! Albert seemed really interested, and reluctant to stop talking (which he did the third time one of his colleagues said they had to go).
‘Maybe Albert is just polite (and a good actor) but what I like to think this conversation demonstrated is what many people have said before – Albert is a very down to earth, ordinary guy who isn’t the least bit theatrical and precious about acting. He works hard at his job, tries to improve with every stage performance and film, but doesn’t make a song and dance about it. Very Salford, in fact …’
7 Finney first expressed his distaste for long runs on his Face to Face interview with John Freeman. He believed they were ‘bad for an actor’. I was reminded of Richard Todd who starred in The Business of Murder for eight years in the eighties at London’s Mayfair Theatre. Michael Aspel intercepted Todd on stage for This is Your Life, just post-performance. And Todd grimaced to the crowd in an expression just like the character he was portraying. It may, or may not, have been intentional, but for a moment it seemed that the actor had a confused identity.
8 Joanna Lumley by Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred.
Chapter 25
1 Julia: Her Life by James Spada.
2 Michael Harney interview with Joel Keller, A.V. Club, 22 June 2015.
3 The Daily Telegraph was wrong on both counts. Judi Dench lost to Marcia Gay Harden, Finney’s co-star in Miller’s Crossing, for her role in Pollock.
4 Significantly, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and Finney, probably in most people
’s Top 10 of great British actors, never won an Oscar despite having twenty nominations between them. (O’Toole, however, was given an honorary Oscar in 2003.)
5 Michael Gambon: A Life in Acting by Mel Gussow.
6 Soderbergh once made a pithy appraisal of Tom Jones, ‘Tom Jones is pleasurable every time you see it, but always in the same way. You have this historical film with crazy helicopter shots, speeded-up action, freeze-frame and actors looking at the camera.’
7 Finney attended the wedding in 2000 of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Guests were asked to make a donation to a new charitable foundation. Finney, who appeared with Douglas in Traffic, donated £1,057, according to documents from the US Internal Revenue Service. Michael Douglas said, ‘Two of my favourite actors are Michael Caine and Albert Finney. They’re two Brits who have mellowed like a fine wine and they are inspirational to me.’
8 What Fresh Lunacy Is This? A biography of Oliver Reed by Robert Sellers.
9 Things I Couldn’t Tell my Mother by Sue Johnston.
Chapter 26
1 But Gambon would not disrobe for the part. Speaking of Finney’s performance, he said, ‘I remember Albert taking his clothes off and lying in the bath. I thought, I don’t want to do that. Oh no.’
2 Ronnie Barker by Bob McCabe.
3 The Happy Hoofer by Celia Imrie.
4 Radio 4 Today, 4 November 2011.
5 Burton on Burton by Tim Burton.
6 Albert Finney interview with Paul Fischer.
Chapter 27
1 Interview with Ridley Scott in IndieLondon.
2 John Newton (1725–1807).
3 There’s Something I’ve Been Dying to Tell You by Lynda Bellingham.
4 Finney was at Birmingham Rep on the day of the disaster, 6 February 1958.
5 Albert Finney interview in The Times, 5 February 2008.
6 At the premiere of Quartet in Toronto in 2012, Connolly, a keen football fan, joked about his attitude to the part. He then made a gaffe, ‘I saw I found myself replacing Tom Finney and [bleeped] myself.’
7 Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2013.
Chapter 28
1 The Salford-born former star of Doctor Who. Eccleston has said of his background, ‘There were lots of jokes about Albert Finney. He’s my hero. I saw him once at an event and a journalist asked if I’d like to meet him, and I said, “Oh no.” I was too overawed. Then later that day, I was pretty drunk and got a tap on my shoulder. It was Albert Finney, who joked I was from the posh part of Salford [Langworthy] and was lovely to me.’ Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Eccleston has a son named Albert. Eccleston has also said, in an interview with the Salford Star, ‘Sir Ben Kingsley is doing a very unSalfordian thing at the moment by insisting people call him “Sir” … Albert Finney famously turned down a knighthood and said “I would never call anyone ‘Sir’ myself and I certainly never expect anyone to call me ‘Sir’”… and then you’ve got Ben Kingsley doing that … very odd … I’ll have to check his Salford credentials.’
2 Daily Mail, 5 July 2010.
3 The Guardian, 30 June 2014.
4 Julian Fellowes recalls a conversation with Albert Finney, ‘In the early eighties, I lived in Hollywood for a while and one night I went out for dinner and Albert Finney was there. At one stage, he turned to me and said, “I know your sort – you’re the sort who has never been given a chance to show what you can do” … And he went on: “But if you’ve got it, they always find you.” I left the restaurant absolutely haunted because I thought, he’s quite right and what if that chance never comes?’
5 The most striking dates back to his time at Birmingham Rep when Finney attacked the Alexandra Theatre as ‘middle-aged, musty and middle-class’.
6 Letter from Lindsay Anderson to Slavek, 21 September 1977.
7 In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting by Carole Zucker.
8 The Guardian, 24 February 2015.
9 For example, read the article by Janice Turner in The Times, 16 January 2016.
10 Steven Berkoff in the Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2015.
11 Brian Cox interviews in The Stage and Calibre magazine, 2015.
12 In a BBC interview, in early 2016, Michael Caine noted the tendency for young actors to say they wanted to be ‘rich and famous’ whereas, according to Caine, he entered the business to be the best actor he could be.
13 In 2006, coinciding with Finney’s 70th birthday, a London-based chain called Sausage and Mash Café set up a petition to get Finney awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar. Obviously it did not succeed. (Unlike the Academy Awards, on which Academy members vote as a whole, the honorary award is chosen by the Academy’s board of governors.)
Albert with his father, Albert Senior, and mother, Alice, in 1960. Unlike so many great artists, Finney had a happy childhood and a close-knit family. (Talbot/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)
Albert and Audrey Hepburn share an intimate moment in Two for the Road. ‘She was rather like a blooming flower and then when her husband arrived, the flower closed up and shrivelled,’ he recalled. (Everett/REX/Shutterstock)
‘Albie climbs mountains at the National,’ said Tom Bell. But the critics knifed Finney and he never returned to Shakespeare. Pictured here with co-star Dorothy Tutin in Macbeth at the Olivier Theatre, 1978. (Reg Wilson/REX/Shutterstock)
Finney was a last-minute replacement for Trey Wilson in the Prohibition-era drama Miller’s Crossing. But he quickly made the part of quick-witted gangster, Leo, his own. Here with Gabriel Byrne, 1990. (Everett/REX/Shutterstock)
An Olivier award-winning performance as Harold in Orphans. Here, giving a little tweak of ‘encouragement’ to Kevin Anderson as Phillip in the original Hampstead Theatre production in 1986. (Alastair Muir/REX/Shutterstock)
In 1996 Finney appeared with frequent co-star Tom Courtenay in Art, Yasmina Reza’s acerbic study of strained friendship. This was Finney’s final stage appearance. (Alastair Muir/REX/Shutterstock)
Pipped to the post again? Finney should have (finally) won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his portrayal of a careworn lawyer in Erin Brockovich. Pictured here with co-star Julia Roberts. (Everett/REX/Shutterstock)
Finney inherited what would have been Oliver Reed’s role in the television series My Uncle Silas and captured the charm of H.E. Bates’s old country rascal. Pictured here with the late Lynda Bellingham. (ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
With third wife Pene at a London ceremony marking his BAFTA fellowship in February 2001. (Richard Young/REX/Shutterstock)
As slaver turned ascetic abolitionist John Newton in Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, Finney showed he could still rivet audiences with his intensity, 2007. (Goldwyn/Everett/REX/Shutterstock)
Strolling Player Page 36