‘Angry young man’ of film and stage rejected honours and celebrity culture
Life Story
When Albert Finney arrived at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he thought that the idea of him becoming an actor was preposterous. He felt ‘‘unsophisticated, ungainly, clumsy and uncouth’’ and was convinced his northern accent and workingclass manners made him a misfit.
‘‘I thought people from my background didn’t become actors,’’ he said many years later. ‘‘I thought actors were bred on a stud farm in Mayfair.’’
In fact, his timing was perfect. He was 17 years old, the era of the ‘‘angry young man’’ was dawning, and rugged male actors wearing their northcountry accents with a swagger were about to come into fashion.
Along with
Tom Courtenay, Finney became the leading avatar of that wave who revolutionised British theatre and film, beginning with his edgy portrayal of a bitter, brawling boozy factory worker in the 1960 film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. An Oscar-nominated performance followed in the title role of Tom Jones, from which he took a percentage that made him a millionaire at 27.
Finney, with his rich, powerful voice, was hailed as ‘‘the new Olivier’’, and he went on to play Hamlet, Tamburlaine and Macbeth at the National Theatre with a northern accent and a very masculine authority.
His brilliant portrayal of Hercule Poirot in the 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express
earned him a second Oscar nomination, and there were further citations for Under the Volcano, The Dresser (with Courtenay) and opposite Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich.
He made a splendid debut as a film director with Charlie Bubbles, one of his most personal documents, and set up his own production company, Memorial, which was responsible for several enterprising and imaginative films, including Lindsay Anderson’s If... and O Lucky Man.
Yet Finney was often accused of not making the most of his formidable talent, even of a certain dilettantism in his long and indulgent sabbaticals. ‘‘Life is more important than art,’’ he said unapologetically.
He rejected David Lean’s invitation to play Lawrence of Arabia and said no when Richard Attenborough asked him to play Gandhi .He could not face the prospect of days, even weeks, in health farms and saunas reducing his well-padded frame.
Laurence Olivier wanted Finney to succeed him as director of the National Theatre, but he preferred the more freewheeling lifestyle of what he termed a ‘‘strolling player’’. After his acclaimed directorial debut, he concluded that telling other actors what to do wasn’t for him, and he never directed another film.
He declined a CBE in 1980 and a
‘‘It’s a long way to go for a party, sitting there for six hours not having a cigarette or a drink.’’ Albert Finney on the Oscars
knighthood 20 years later. ‘‘The ‘Sir’ thing perpetuates one of our diseases, which is snobbery, and helps keep us ‘quaint’, of which I’m not a great fan,’’ he explained.
Nominated for an Oscar five times, Finney declined to attend on each occasion. ‘‘It’s a long way to go for a party, sitting there for six hours not having a cigarette or a drink.’’
He avoided the round of television chat shows and, to the frustration of many, he eschewed the big classical roles – there never was a Finney Lear, Falstaff or Othello. Pressed on why not, he said: ‘‘They don’t keep asking Robert de Niro when he’s going to play Lear, do they?’’
His dislike of ‘‘luvvie’’ culture was palpable. ‘‘The last thing you’d think after talking to him was that he’s an actor,’’ said Gabriel Byrne. ‘‘I never heard him talk about acting. You’d talk with Albert about football or politics or what was going on down the road.’’
Yet, at the same time, he was an enthusiastic sybarite, who enjoyed his wealth and was for many years something of a man about town in London and New York. A celebrated sensualist with an easy conscience, he had three wives and an endless list of paramours. His first marriage to the actress Jane Wenham in 1957 lasted four years and produced a son, Simon. In 1970 he married the French actress Anouk Aimee.
There were also relationships with the actresses Audrey Hepburn, Jacqueline Bisset, Diana Quick, Jean Marsh, Cathryn Harrison and Marsha Mason, among others. In 2006 he married for a third time, to Pene Delmage, a former travel agent, with whom he had been living since 1989.
Albert Finney was born in 1936 in Salford, Manchester, the youngest of three children and only son of Alice and a bookmaker known locally as ‘‘Honest Albert’’, whose business was not strictly legal but was ‘‘tolerated’’ by the local constabulary. He was a lifelong follower of Manchester United, and narrated a 2008 documentary about the 1958 Munich air disaster in which eight of the ‘‘Busby Babes’’ were killed.
Despite his five Oscar nominations, Finney’s film career seemed to lose focus, and he refused to employ an agent or a manager.
He was diagnosed with cancer of the kidney in 2011, and was nursed through his final illness by his third wife. –