National Post (National Edition)
ALBERT FINNEY, A STAR OF SCREEN AND STAGE WHO DEFIED TYPE.
British actor defined era of social turmoil
LON DON • Albert Finney, the British stage and film actor who defined an era’s rage and frustration in dramas of blue- collar realism and social revolt and went on to find stardom in Hollywood, died Thursday in London. He was 82.
His death, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, was confirmed by Jon Oakley, a partner at Simkins, a law firm that represents the Finney family. The cause was a chest infection, he said.
Finney became one of his generation’s finest and most honoured actors over six decades. A frequent nominee for an Oscar and Britain’s equivalent of one, the BAFTA, he was a star as comfortable in movies like Tom Jones, Murder on the Orient Express, Under the Volcano and Erin Brockovich as he was on the classical British stage.
He first came to wide attention alongside contemporaries like Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay, actors collectively known as “angry young men” — counterparts to the playwrights and novelists who shared that sobriquet. Together they helped turn Britain’s gaze inward, toward gritty industrial landscapes, where a generation of disaffected youth railed against the class system and the claustrophobic trap it laid for workers locked in dead-end jobs.
Finney was propelled to early stardom by Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a low-budget 1960 film steeped in smoggy vistas of smokestacks and deprivation and shot in stark black and white. Finney played Arthur Seaton, a restless young man caught in sexual adventures and bouts of beer drinking intended to distract him from his job at a cavernous bicycle factory.
His broad-vowelled northern accent injected a powerful authenticity into the part, and his acting style drew favourable comparisons to such titans of the English stage as Laurence Olivier. Yet he preferred wealth to accolades, according to his biographer, Quentin Falk.
“At the turn of the ’60s, Finney was the screen’s incarnation of the new working-class hero,” Falk wrote in Albert Finney in Character, published in 1992 and republished in 2015. “In the theatre, he was barely 20 when he was hailed as the ‘ new Olivier.’ Yet instead of pursuing either mantle, he became a millionaire and made love to beautiful women on several continents.”
Falk added: “To some he is still the leading actor of his generation; to others, though, he has suffered an ambition bypass. To even severer critics, he appears to have remained cheerfully indolent, almost wilfully failing to fulfil the remarkable early promise.”
Finney went on to play an eclectic array of movie roles, from the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-studded version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in 1975, to the pugnacious lawyer Edward L. Masry, who hires the crusading title character (Julia Roberts) in Erin Brockovich ( 2000), Steven Soderbergh’s tale of a power company pollution scandal.
But in 2007 Finney dropped out of sight, disclosing only in 2011 that he had been struggling for four years with cancer. After his return to acting, he took small parts in the thriller The Bourne Legacy and the James Bond movie Skyfall, both in 2012.
“The pattern of my life is that there is no pattern,” Finney once said. “In work I like doing things that are different, contrasting. I’m lurching rather than pointing in any given direction.”
An episode in 1960 seemed to confirm that selfassessment. Finney had a long screen test for the lead role in David Lean’s epic movie Lawrence of Arabia, but, according to Falk, he rejected a lucrative five- year contract with the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, saying: “I didn’t know where I want to be in five years’ time — or tomorrow for that matter.”
The role, of the adventurer T.E. Lawrence, went to Peter O’Toole and turned him into an international star.
Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in Tom Jones, Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’ 1983 version of The Dresser; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s Under the Volcano, based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in Erin Brockovich earned him a best-supporting actor nomination.
He was also nominated 13 times for a BAFTA and won twice.
He never won an Oscar, however, and made a point of not attending the glittering award ceremonies.
Finney’s aversion to such accolades extended even to Britain’s own system of medals, knighthoods and peerages. In 2000, he turned down an opportunity to become Sir Albert Finney, echoing an earlier rejection of a lesser award. He said the honours system was a way of “perpetuating snobbery.”
Albert Finney was born on May 9, 1936, in Salford, near Manchester in northwest England, the third child and first son of Alice Hobson, who left school at age 14 to work in a mill, and Albert Finney Sr., who made his living running bets on horse racing.
As a high school student at Salford Grammar School, Finney displayed both a liking for the theatre and a poor grasp of academic subjects.
A teacher suggested that he apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Finney met Jane Wenham, a fellow actor, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957. The couple married and had a son, Simon, who became a film technician. They divorced in 1961. Finney married the French actress Anouk Aimée in 1970. They divorced in 1978. He married Pene Delmage, a travel specialist, in 2006.
He is survived by his wife, his son and two grandchildren.