HICKEY

AMID the tributes to late actor Albert Finney, who has died aged 82, former Tory leader Michael Howard’s wife Sandra, pictured, is haunted by one long-ago faux pas.

“A good friend, the playwright Ronald Harwood, had given us tickets to see his brilliant play, Another Time, in which Albert Finney was starring, and we met up for supper afterwards,” the novelist and former model, 78, has recalled.

“I was so thrilled and flustered to be meeting Albert Finney that I blurted out what a fan I was and how much I loved seeing him in [1966 film] Alfie.

“‘Er, actually, it was Michael Caine in that part,’ he said gently, with a forgiving smile. I fell over myself apologising, blushing to my roots.”

LONG before he grew up to be one of the world’s finest actors, Sir Ian McKellen already obviously had impossibly high theatrical standards.

Recalling his first childhood experience of a show – seeing Peter Pan in Manchester – McKellen, now 79, admits that he unreasonably took exception to the lead character failing to fly unaided, but with the help of wires.

“I was a very critical three-year-old,” he now acknowledges.

ALMOST half a century after its release, it emerges Sir Mick Jagger’s popular 1970 movie Performance – an early effort by the recently departed Nicolas Roeg – in which James Fox’s violent gangster hides out at the home of Jagger’s reclusive rock star, won the approval of infamous villain Ronnie Kray.

On learning he was the inspiration for one of the film’s crooks, Kray remarked: “Does it slag me off? No? Well that’s all right then, innit.”