A working-class hero of Sixties cinema
Albert Finney 1936-2019
On arriving at Rada in the early 1950s, Albert Finney was convinced he didn’t belong, said The Times. The son of a bookmaker from Salford, he felt “unsophisticated, ungainly, clumsy and uncouth”; the idea that he could become a professional actor seemed preposterous. But the 17-year-old’s timing was perfect. The “era of the ‘angry young man’ was dawning”, and rugged male actors with working-class swagger were about to become all the rage. Handsome, stocky and proudly Lancastrian, Finney was, with Tom Courtenay, at the head of a new generation of working-class and regional actors who transformed British cinema and theatre in the 1960s – starting with his portrayal of the disillusioned, brawling, womanising factory worker Arthur Seaton, in the 1960 film adaption of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. With his rich voice and commanding stage presence, Finney, who has died aged 82, was hailed as a “new Olivier”. It was a tag he hated, and he grew tired of people worrying that he had not lived up to his early promise. The fact was he was an easily contented man, who just wasn’t that interested in professional acclaim, let alone fame, said the Daily Mail. He turned down the title role in Lawrence of Arabia, because its producer, Sam Spiegel, wanted to tie him to a five-year contract. After filming Tom Jones (1963) he took a year off, to travel. He was nominated for five Oscars, but never attended the ceremony. He refused a knighthood, and gave few interviews. “If I’m trying to convince the audience I might be Tom, Dick or Harry, the less they see of Albert the better,” he once observed. Nor was he much of a “luvvie”. Gabriel Byrne, who worked with Finney on Miller’s Crossing (1990), said that “the last thing you’d think after talking to him was that he’s an actor”. On the other hand, he was no ascetic. Mischievous, funny and flirtatious, he had affairs with countless of his co-stars (including Audrey Hepburn); he enjoyed expensive restaurants and fine wines; and owned several racehorses. As he had said as Seaton: “What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.” Born in Salford in 1936, Albie, as he was known, was the youngest of three children born to Alice (née Hobson), an ex-millworker, and “Honest Albert” Finney, a bookie. He inherited a love of racing from his father, and discovered acting at Salford Grammar. The head teacher encouraged him to apply to Rada, where his classmates included Courtenay and Peter O’toole, and where he was soon spotted by Kenneth Tynan, who hailed a “smouldering young Spencer Tracy... who will soon disturb the dreams of Messrs Burton and Scofield”. “And so it proved,” said Michael Coveney in The Guardian. “His rise was instant and meteoric. He played Brutus, Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth at the Birmingham Rep,” and in 1959, replaced a sick Laurence Olivier in the title role in Coriolanus at Stratford. The next year, he made his film debut alongside Olivier in The Entertainer. On the back of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, he was cast in Tom Jones, which made him a millionaire at 27, and won him his first Oscar nomination. But rather than go to Hollywood, he spent the next ten years at the National Theatre.
As a producer, he backed Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968), and the first features of Mike Leigh, Bleak Moments (1971), and of Stephen Frears, Gumshoe (1971). On screen, he was Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Daddy Warbucks in Annie (1982); an ageing actor in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser (1983); the drunken consul in Under the Volcano (1984); and the lawyer in Erin Brockovich (2000). On the small screen, he won an Emmy for his role as Churchill in The Gathering Storm (2002). His last film was Skyfall (2012). Finney was married first to Jane Wenham, actress, with whom he had his only child, Simon, now a camera operator. His second wife, the French star Anouk Aimée, left him for Ryan O’neal in 1975. In 2006, he married former travel agent Pene Delmage, with whom he had been living since 1989. She survives him. “I am exceptionally happy with Pene,” he said, in 2003. “I’m a born flirt, and that will never stop, but I would take things no further. I’m loyal and content.”