Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Albert Finney dies,82
Legend snubbed knighthood & hit at gongs snobbery
the gorgeous women he went out with, I was probably very small-fry.”
His lovers included Joan Baez, Carly Simon, Billie Whitelaw, Jacqueline Bisset and Shelley Winters. And he married three times – to actors Jane Wenham and Anouk Aimeé, from 1957-61 and 1970-78, and travel agent Pene Delmage in 2006, who survives him with his son Simon, by Anouk.
His first London turn was in 1958, in Jane Arden’s The Party, then in 1959 he replaced an ill Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus in Stratford. In 1960, he joined Olivier in his first film, The Entertainer. But it was 1960 kitchensink drama Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that made him a star, as working-class anti-hero Arthur Seaton.
As Seaton, he said the words which maybe sum him up best: “Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.”
Its gritty realism changed cinema and earned brooding Finney his “angry” title. It also earned an X-certificate from censors. Bawdy romp Tom Jones came next, winning four Oscars and a first nomination for Finney.
He then starred with Audrey Hepburn in 1967’s Two For the Road – amid reports he was having an affair with the married actress.
Scrooge the musical came in 1970, then his Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express. The 1982 film version of Annie again proved he could sing.
Meanwhile, he was one to stand up for his beliefs, joining an anti-apartheid protest at the South African Embassy in London in 1976.
Finney was generous, too. When he made his fortune he gave other Brits a break, paying for films by up-andcoming directors including Lindsay Anderson, Mike Leigh and Stephen Frears. His later career included 2001’s Erin Brockovich and he won Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy gongs as Churchill in 2002 hit The Gathering Storm.
Younger fans will recall him in Traffic and Big Fish, plus Skyfall in 2012.
But he always kept a sense of perspective about his trade. “One is actually a performer, a juggler, a sword swallower. It is a sort of a sideshow, isn’t it?” he said.
And he disliked fame, saying: “Walking around in the spotlight having to be me is not something I’m comfortable with or desire.”
In his later years, there was a battle with kidney cancer, which he beat in 2011 after six rounds of chemo. Ultimately, Albert Finney was a man who never compromised who he was. Of his incredible success, he said simply: “I was dead lucky.”