Because he made his name on screen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Albert Finney was often characterised as one of the new rugged, working-class school of actors. In fact, his father was a successful Salford bookmaker and, on stage, Finney was built in the heroic mould. He had that indefinable quality called “weight” and played many of the big roles: Macbeth and Hamlet, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Pirandello’s Henry IV. He could do farce and comedy equally well but you felt he was born to play the classic heavies. The irony is that the nearest he got to playing King Lear was as “Sir” in the movie of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser.
I’m happy to say I cottoned on to Finney early. As a theatre-mad teenager, I went one afternoon in 1956 to see a whimsical Irish melodrama, Happy as Larry, at the old Birmingham Rep. It included a chorus of dancing tailors and my attention was riveted by a stocky, square-shouldered figure with a centre parting that looked as it had been ironed across his head: his name, I discovered, was Albert Finney and he was a 20-year-old just out of Rada.
After that, I saw everything he did at the Rep. He was an astonishing Henry V: a young warrior with the impishness of a practical joker. Kenneth Tynan, then the Observer drama critic, was also quick to spot Finney and compared him, in his muscular authority and latent power, to Spencer Tracy. You saw what Tynan meant when Finney took the lead in a modern play, The Lizard on the Rock, and died an unforgettable death: shot at point-blank range, he stared at his killer in agonised disbelief, uttered three faint cries and then keeled irrevocably over.
Finney’s stage career in the 60s blossomed alongside his movie stardom. In 1960 he was the first stage Billy Liar and in 1961 played the title-role in John Osborne’s Luther. He superbly embodied Osborne’s idea of Luther as the architect of the individual conscience obedient to no earthly authority. But Finney also gave us, again in Tynan’s words, “the infinitely vulnerable Everyman who looks like a reincarnation of the young Henry Irving fattened up for some cannibal feast”.
Finney was also a vital part of Laurence Olivier’s 1960s National Theatre company at the Old Vic and two performances stand out for their comic finesse. In Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy he played a camp antique-dealer pointing out to a naive young woman that “actually there wasn’t a Mrs Michelangelo”. Even finer was Finney’s performance as the physically identical heroes – a smart Parisian bourgeois and a lumpen hotel porter – in Feydeau’s A Flea In Her Ear. Finney’s genius was never to exaggerate the difference between the two men so that the mistaken-identity plot became wholly plausible.
Inevitably, Finney’s film career began to take over but everything he did on stage showed his versatility. For Michael Blakemore at the Glasgow Citizens, he played the insane king in Pirandello’s Henry IV and the ironic schoolmaster in Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. He also had a golden period at the Royal Court in the early 1970s when he played the maritally agonised hero of Ted Whitehead’s Alpha Beta and the reminiscent protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett may be the poet of terminal stages but Finney reminded us that the senile Krapp has known moments of happiness: as he recalled his afternoon with a girl in a punt, Finney allowed his head to sink into the crook of his arm as if remembering a paradise lost.
It was often claimed that Finney, having made his fortune in films, drifted away from theatre. No-one, however, could have worked harder in support of Peter Hall at the foundation of the National Theatre at the Southbank in 1976. He played Hamlet, Macbeth (less excitingly than he had in Birmingham), Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, Mr Horner in The Country Wife and the inordinate hero in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. I remember that Finney was suffering badly from bronchitis on opening-night but he still gave us the vaunting rhetoric and flamboyant theatricality of Marlowe’s overweening hero. I suggested at the time that he was all armour and no chink but it was still a brave, commanding performance.
If any one stage performance stands out from his later years, it was as one of the three characters in Yasmina Reza’s study of the dangers of unremitting truth-telling, Art: it was especially moving to see Finney reunited with an actor whose career often ran in tandem with his own, Tom Courtenay. But my final memory is of meeting Finney when we were co-panellists in a celebration at Chichester of Peter Shaffer a couple of years ago and where he jokingly asked Shaffer why he hadn’t written him more roles. Although he was visibly unwell, it was a vivid reminder that Albert was an actor to his fingertips.
