Not just a FINNEY FACE
Strolling Player: The Life And Career Of Albert Finney Gabriel Hershman The History Press €28
Long before ‘celebrity’ became a dirty word, Albert Finney knew it was something to be avoided. That’s why he steered clear of chat shows, Desert Island Discs and even turned down a knighthood. While his friends and contemporaries Caine, McKellen and Hopkins are all ‘Sirs’, Finney remains plain ‘Mister’.
But despite this romantic attachment to the idea of being nothing but a ‘strolling player’, Finney remains, for many critics, the most important British actor of the postwar period. His 1960 turn in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning ushered in the era of the kitchen-sink drama, while his bravura portrayal of Churchill in The Gathering Storm in 2002 remains definitive.
He has five Oscar nominations although, tellingly, he has never won. On stage, where he is happiest, Finney has always thrilled audiences, whether singing in Annie or giving his superlative performance in Luther, John Osborne’s 1961 play. The job of running Britain’s National Theatre was once his for the asking. There is, in short, no performer who has achieved so much as ‘Albie’ Finney, the bookmaker’s son from Salford – the city in Greater Manchester. He decided early on that he would act to live rather than the other way round. The reason Finney has always been so secure about his status, suggests Gabriel Hershman in this enlightening biography, is that his early family life was close and loving, not to mention prosperous. Coming from Salford may have made Albie ‘Northern’, but it didn’t mean he was exactly working class. His father was good at making money and there was no hesitation in sending the lad to the prestigious grammar school. Albie’s self-image also seems to have been secure, for despite being stocky and red-headed, he never doubted his attractiveness to women. First married at just 21, his girlfriends have included Carly Simon and Diana Quick. And it’s not just the ladies who love him: all the reports from co-workers suggest that Finney is thoroughly decent and down to earth, keener to invite his chauffeur to dinner than to schmooze studio heads. Still, Hershman is not so much of a superfan that he is prepared to brush over the less happy moments of Finney’s career. There were occasions on which the actor, now 80, has been seriously miscast, and other times when he simply didn’t seem to get to grips with his role. He certainly looked awkward playing Audrey Hepburn’s husband in the 1967 flop Two For The Road even if, the rumours went, he had an intense affair with his married leading lady.
And, unlike his contemporaries McKellen and Jacobi, the classics have never been Finney’s bag: ‘I like doing them from time to time but if you wear tights all your life you walk funny.’ Shakespearean verse tends to leave him tonguetied and his 1978 Macbeth was, by all accounts, stiff and flat.
Hershman makes it clear at the beginning of his biography that Finney did not want him to write it. Many of his close friends refused to give interviews for fear of ‘upsetting Albie’. But Finney needn’t have worried. Hershman has managed to gather a huge amount of information and distil it into a book that is not only respectful but full of insight into what makes this unstarriest of stars able to produce brilliant work without ever appearing to break a sweat.