Beguiling talent who ushered in a sea change for British cinema
There is a tacit understanding in the film business that if the Oscars deign to show you love, you must show love to the Oscars. Albert Finney had little time for that. “I’ve been nominated five times, I think, and I’ve never been,” he said in 2003. “I was in London. It’s a long way to go for a very long party, sitting there for six hours not having a cigarette or drink. It’s a waste of time.”
That casual “I think” is a minimaster stroke of shade, but Finney got his tally on the nose. He was indeed nominated five times between 1964 and 2001 – yet never won for a series of roles that brilliantly deployed the signature blue-collar vigour and strut that had previously been so alien to the British leading man sphere.
There were the star turns in Tom Jones in 1963 and Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, in which he played an uncommonly curmudgeonly Hercule Poirot. Then came the finely carved comic character study of The Dresser in 1983, and the boozy psychodrama of Under the Volcano in 1984. Then finally, the rock-solid supporting part: as the brusque lawyer whose job it was to let Julia Roberts shine in Erin Brockovich in 2001. It was that last type – bristling away in a film’s margins – that a new generation of cinemagoers came to know him for.
Finney rose to prominence as the philandering, footloose factory worker Arthur Seaton in 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He knew the role signalled a sea-change in British cinema, often noting that it had made him the first man to be seen sleeping with another man’s wife in an English film. It also made him one of the defining “angry young men” of the British New Wave.
“Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not”: Arthur’s maxim in Saturday Night… could have been a motto for Finney’s own expectation scotching career. Born in 1936 to “lower middleclass” parents in
Salford, Lancs, he came of age at a time when film and theatre were moving in tandem, and his ability to beguile the front row one moment and blow a hole in the back of the stalls the next made him the perfect movie star to emerge from this bold new age of cine-realism. The director of Saturday Night…, Karel Reisz, discovered him when he was playing Coriolanus at Stratford.
The industry knew a star when it saw one. He was David Lean’s first choice for Lawrence of Arabia, but made Tom Jones instead. Years later, he shook off the role of Poirot with similar scepticism, returning to the theatre, having tired of cinema’s stop-start rhythms and muffling disguises. Being whatever they said he was would have been predictable. Far better to have been Albert Finney.