When I was young, an aging generation of classically trained British ‘Sirs’ of the stage were still performing on the screen — Gielgud, Richardson, Mills, Redgrave, Olivier, Scofield. Then, in the late 1950’s and ‘60s, along came a new gaggle, born in the thirties, who would put a different face on British excellence.
Among them were Sean Connery born in 1930, Peter O’Toole ’32, Michael Caine ’33, Alan Bates ’34, Tom Courtney and Anthony Hopkins ’37, and in their midst, born in 1936, Albert Finney who died last week. Many, including Finney, had a working class background and came to prominence in an era of kitchen sink films with proletarian anti-heroes: Courtney in “Billy Liar” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” Caine in The Ipcress File” and “Alfie,” Richard Harris in “This Sporting Life,” and Finney in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”
Finney, a bookmaker’s son from the Midlands who maintained allegiance to Manchester United for life, could play streetwise toughs, but soon graduated to a wide range of roles beginning with the film that made him a sensation around the world, “Tom Jones.” He played many parts, but the wink of the amiable rogue figured in many.
Finney won a scholarship to RADA at the same time as Courtney, Bates and O’Toole, and spent three years before appearing on film with the Royal Shakespeare Company where he was directed by and starred with Charles Laughton, understudied Olivier, and got noticed as the next great stage thespian. Throughout his career, as British actors are wont to do, he returned often to the stage.
In fifty years on film he gave audiences a great deal of pleasure in starring and supporting roles. A homicidal maniac in “Night Must Fall,” a bad-tempered, unfaithful, yet oddly endearing husband to Audrey Hepburn in “Two for the Road,” memorably singing “I Hate People” as “Scrooge” and as Daddy Warbucks in “Annie.” Very funny as a bingo caller pretending to be a Bogart private eye in “Gumshoe,” elaborately made-up to become Agatha Christie’s favorite incarnation of Hercule Poirot, terminally alcoholic in “The Green Man” and “Under the Volcano.”
Other essential Finney films are his New York detective trading barbs with Gregory Hines as they confront deeply weird murders in “Wolfen,” a family man going through a painful divorce from Diane Keaton in “Shoot the Moon,” as ‘Sir’, an aging, befuddled actor, with Tom Courtney in “The Dresser,” as a ‘20s Irish-American mob boss in “Miller’s Crossing,” a Charleston father whose wife abandons he and his children in “Rich in Love,” a closeted gay Dublin bus conductor in “A Man of No Importance, and as a charming dying father or dead father figure in “Big Fish” and “A Good Year.”
And, of course, as an attorney who loses a client’s case, is strong-armed into giving her a job, and is gobsmacked when she becomes a force of nature in “Erin Brockovich.” That was one of five Academy Award nominated performances, none of which he won. But Cary Grant, Peter O’Toole, Robert Mitchum, Stanwyck, Garbo and Lombard took home no statuettes either, so who do you blame, the actor or the voters?
If the Academy did not recognize him, his peers, and directors in particular, understood his worth. He worked for many of the best of his time and place — old pros and young up-and-comers: Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Stanley Donen, Ronald Neame, Stephen Frears, Sidney Lumet, Ridley Scott, Michael Wadleigh, Alan Parker, Peter Yates, John Huston, Alan J. Pakula, Mike Figgis, Steven Soderbergh, Tim Burton, and the Coen brothers.
Finney, true to his blue collar origins, cared less about the honors than the work. He was offered both a CBE and a Knighthood and turned them down. He said all the ‘Sir’ business perpetuated the English disease of snobbery, and that we should all be ‘misters’ together. He also said he hated giving interviews because the job was acting as somebody else, not explaining himself.
Whatever the part, there was always a hint of the charmer, the unbiddable rogue, the individualist about Finney. He may not have been quite the icon some of his peers became, but he was a cheerful, outspoken, iconoclast who loved his job. He said acting was lying for a living, but in doing so “I always tell the truth,” and audiences loved him for it.