At the age of 51, in the middle of a virtuoso stage and screen career, Albert Finney – whose death at 82 was announced on Friday – spoke to the Observer of his changing attitude to acting and of his childhood background in Salford. Finney’s comments, coupled with a telling portrait by the newspaper’s acclaimed photographer, the late Jane Bown, reveal both his appetite for life and his concern to make the right artistic choices.
“Perhaps in the past I have wanted to get out the two-hour make-up, to show that acting is really a job for a man. It was what I thought acting was … but it wasn’t me,” Finney told Observer writer Nicholas Wapshott in March 1988.
On Saturday morning the actor Tom Courtenay, 81, a great friend of Finney’s and a working-class actor who emerged at the same time, as part of a new wave of realism in British performance, spoke of his feelings of awe about Finney’s talent. “He didn’t need any tricks as an actor,” he said. “He just came on with a bit of sunshine.”
Finney, whose father was an illegal bookmaker, told the Observer his mother used to urge him to tell people that his dad worked as a “commission agent” instead. “There wasn’t an instilled work ethic of nine to five,” he recalled. The actor, who by 1988 had established himself as a popular star in the roles of Billy Liar (a part played by Courtenay on screen), Tom Jones, Hamlet and Hercule Poirot, was welcoming the dawn of a more confident, adventurous middle period of his working life.
“Perhaps I was a bit earnest about being an actor,” he said. “Perhaps I am more able now to be simply me. All a performance needs, after all, is to make people believe. We are just jugglers on the side of the road. Why worry about being serious?” He also explained his enjoyment of the preparatory stages of performance: “I like researching and reading around a part, getting into an area of life that you wouldn’t normally know about. You half learn to ride a horse or get to know a bit about archery.”
The Observer’s encounter with Finney 31 years ago also detects a “prosperous roundness to his face”. It is a hearty image that Courtenay remembers fondly. Speaking in tribute yesterday, he said his favourite description of his friend came from Sir Alec Guinness who once said: “Albert is like a shiny English apple.”
1960 Nottingham factory worker Arthur Seaton in Karel Reisz’s screen adaption of Alan Sillitoe’s book, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
1963 Tom Jones, the raffish 18th- century libertine at the centre of Tony Richardson’s cinematic version of Henry Fielding’s novel.
1974 Hercule Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express, Sidney Lumet’s glossy retelling of Agatha Christie’s whodunnit.
1983 Sir, in The Dresser, opposite Tom Courtenay’s Norman in Ronald Harwood’s tale of a bombastic theatrical knight and his devoted sidekick.
1990 Leo O’Bannon, Irish mobster in the Coen brothers’ atmospheric thriller Miller’s Crossing.
2000 Lawyer Ed Masry in the Steven Soderbergh film Erin Brockovich. The part earned Finney the last of his five Oscar nominations.
