The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Working class hero lives on
It was very sad a few days ago to read of the death of that wonderful actor Albert Finney. One of the greats of theatre and film, behind the scenes as producer and director as well as in front of the camera, he paved the way for the “angry young men” and the talented young working-class performers of the 1960s who changed our viewing culture for a generation.
Even nowadays, actors with his kind of background – northern, stateeducated, from what might be called less privileged beginnings – are not, if I can put it that way, that common.
Finney was friends with and starred with the best, even if it took him, and some of them, a while to get there.
There’s a wonderful line in Michael Caine’s recent memoir, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, where he underlines how difficult getting on in acting was – and probably still is. But then you catch a glimpse of the context.
“The other people hanging around with me waiting for work included Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay...”
Not a bad cast list, is it?
I’ve loved most things with Finney in them – from definitive ’60s drama, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, via period rollicking in Tom Jones, through Poirot, Scrooge, Churchill and scene stealing from what Bing Crosby once described as “the newer fellas”, like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Matt Damon as Jason Bourne.
He may have been defined by his working-class roots and proud of where he came from but nobody could say he didn’t have range.
There was the twinkle in his eye, the wonderful voice, the gravitas plus the humour and an ability to get to the heart of a character without revealing too much of himself.
Away from stage and screen he was, according to his friends and contemporaries, often mischievous, a terrible tease and frequently outrageous but generous, kind and supportive to his colleagues.
Nominated for five Oscars, he turned down both a CBE and a knighthood.
Probably one of the last things he did on screen was his memorable turn as the gruff Highland gamekeeper, Kincade, in Skyfall, generally regarded as one of the best James Bond films ever made.
Apparently, with that film’s retro slant on the Bond story (including the Gothic Highland family home that supposedly shaped 007 and the cameo appearance of the iconic Aston Martin DB5), the producers were tempted to offer the role to Sir Sean Connery.
That, I suspect, would have been too self-conscious and self-referential but they could hardly have made a better choice than Finney. He took a cliché and made it a class act.
He was also one of the four actors in that movie who had played Hamlet (none of whom, interestingly, was Daniel Craig) – the others being Ben Whishaw, Ralph Fiennes and Rory Kinnear. Add to that Dame Judi Dench, “M” or as Kincade kept calling her, Emma, who played a memorable on-stage Ophelia and that’s a group pedigree to conjure with.
I have found myself on numerous occasions over the past couple of years sitting through the entire film again and again, just to get to the bit near the end where Finney saw off a horde of vicious villains with a shotgun blast and a laconic: “Welcome to Scotland.”
Nobody, to use another James Bond film quote, does it better.
... the twinkle in his eye, the voice ... the ability to get to the heart of a character without revealing too much of himself
l I know politicians and their ilk don’t do irony any more. They say that ridicule is one way to deal with the vainglory and pretensions of the unaccountable powerful, to bring them down to size and show them up for what they really are.
But – even if we are not (quite) yet talking about dictatorships in the still democratically-clinging west – it doesn’t help the cause of lacerating humour or ego-deflating belly laughs when many of our politicos come with ridicule and jaw-dropping levels of unconscious irony built in.
What can you do against that? Having a good old giggle at US PresidentDonald Trump’s tweets or the sight of Tory politician Jacob ReesMogg’s head grafted onto the body of Jarvis Cocker in a Youtube version of Common People somehow only serves to make these public figures less figures of fun than something a bit cosier and more acceptable. There was an extra good one this week, though, with Boris Johnson’s fulminations about Jeremy Corbyn’s customs union idea turning Britain into a “permanent colony” of the EU.
Remember former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab not realising the importance of the Channel as a means of communication and supply to an island nation?
It’s even better when a supposed historian like Mr Johnson somehow conveniently manages to forget that forcing many other nations with something worth stealing to accept colonisation and rule from outwith their borders was the raison d’etre of this country for generations.
The past, of course, is another country; they do things differently there.
It might be a safe bet to assume, however, that somehow, Boris thinks that might have been quite a good thing…