World: Actor Finney dies at age 82.
LONDON >> Albert Finney, the British stage and film actor who defined an era’s rage and frustration in dramas of blue-collar realism and social revolt and went on to find stardom in Hollywood, died Thursday in London. He was 82.
His death, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, was confirmed by Jon Oakley, a partner at Simkins, a law firm that represents the Finney family. The cause was a chest infection, he said.
Finney became one of his generation’s finest and most honored actors over six decades. A frequent nominee for an Oscar and Britain’s equivalent of one, the BAFTA, he was a star as comfortable in movies like “Tom Jones,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Under the Volcano” and “Erin Brockovich” as he was on the classical British stage.
He first came to wide attention alongside contemporaries like Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay, actors collectively known as “angry young men” — counterparts to the playwrights and novelists who shared that sobriquet. Together they helped turn Britain’s gaze inward, toward gritty industrial landscapes, where a generation of disaffected youth railed against the class system and the claustrophobic trap it laid for workers locked in dead-end jobs.
Finney was propelled to early stardom by “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” a low-budget 1960 film steeped in smoggy vistas of smokestacks and deprivation and shot in stark black and white. Finney played Arthur Seaton, a restless young man caught in sexual adventures and bouts of beer drinking intended to distract him from his job at a cavernous bicycle factory.
His broad-voweled northern accent injected a powerful authenticity into the part, and his acting style drew favorable comparisons to such titans of the English stage as Laurence Olivier. Yet he preferred wealth to accolades, according to his biographer, Quentin Falk.
“At the turn of the ’60s, Finney was the screen’s incarnation of the new working-class hero,” Falk wrote in “Albert Finney in Character,” published in 1992 and republished in 2015. “In the theater, he was barely 20 when he was hailed as the ‘new Olivier.’ Yet instead of pursuing either mantle, he became a millionaire and made love to beautiful women on several
continents.”
The angry young men were a prelude to the explosion of creativity and license that characterized the swinging ’60s, when the songs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other bands were anthems to a new permissiveness that changed British society.
Finney went on to play an eclectic array of movie roles, from the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Sidney Lumet’s star-studded version of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1975, to
the pugnacious lawyer Edward L. Masry, who hires the crusading title character (Julia Roberts) in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), Steven Soderbergh’s tale of a power company pollution scandal.
But in 2007, Finney dropped out of sight, disclosing only in 2011 that he had been struggling for four years with cancer. After his return to acting, he took small parts in the thriller “The Bourne Legacy” and the James Bond movie “Skyfall,” both in 2012.