Albert Finney still to find great role

Press, 9 March 1984, Page 17

Albert Finney still to find great role

‘Observer’ profile

Albert Finney was not, in 1956, the kind of name one had if one was.an actor. Well, maybe it would pass for someone who specialised in playing wizened northern caretakers, the kind of pawky old actor who cannot be imagined as having ever been young. At Birmingham Rep, where its bearer began his career, “Albert” must have stood out at a terse, awkward angle in the programme among the expected Geoffreys and Michaels. Agents and producers in his early years begged him to change it but he refused. He was right; and not just because his arrival coincided with the eruption of working-class (actually lower-middle class) plays that started with “Look Back in Anger.” The name may have become fashionable but it has, oddly, remained unique. When anybody in the British theatre talks about Albert, there is only one Albert they can mean. It is worth dwelling on the name because it has always suited him so perfectly. It has a stocky, humorous ring to it: it suggests common sense, athletic virility (his namesake, Tom Finney, was a star footballer) and, emphatically, the North of England. Finney has always been able to capitalise on his background. He is better than just northern; he is from Salford which, at the beginning of his career, had a brief moment as centre of the universe. Shelagh Delaney came from there, and told us all about it in “A Taste of Honey.” Years later, on television, he was characteristically funny about it,

saying that the audience knew what an impossible job he had, following Olivier in one of his greatest roles. Once they had swallowed their disappointment and puzzled over the slip in the programme (“Albert who?”) they had to be on his side.

He broke through the following year, a long way from Shakespeare but close to his roots, in the stage version of “Billy Liar.” He was due to appear a few months earlier in a similar flamboyant role in “The Long and the Short and the Tall” but he got sick and the break went to O’Toole instead. The two of them were now the official figureheads for the New Actors who were patently needed for reasons of both art and public relations, to complement the New Playwrights. When he left Birmingham, at 21, Finney had already played Henry V and Macbeth, and people were getting ready to call him great. He went, as was expected of him, to Stratford to play juvenile leads, and had a fairly disastrous season. His best notices were for playing the First Citizen in “Coriolanus,” and the same production gave him his biggest break of the year. He understudied Laurence Olivier in the title role, and had to go on for him. There were no reviews but the echoes of his success reached London.

Even before his Birmingham debut Finney had been the subject of prophecy and speculation. Kenneth Tynan, in a prescient review that he was careful to preserve among his collected works, had called him a “smouldering young

Spencer Tracy.” This was for a performance he gave at RADA, where his generation was a famous one: Frank Finlay, Brian Bedford, John Stride, Peter O’Toole.

He and O’Toole were linked together, groomed as rivals. When Finney was at Birmingham, O’Toole was at the Bristol Old Vic; and those were the theatres that were expected to produce future classical stars.

It was a time, the late 1950 s and early 19605, when anything seemed possible; a renaissance in the British theatre was taken for granted, and there were even rumours of one in the British cinema. Both actors were launched as film stars: Finney in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” O’Toole on a wider international stage in “Lawrence of Arabia.” When Richard Harris made “The Sporting Life” his name was added to theirs.

They were touted as the hellraisers of British acting, young men who would give truthful, searing, hilarious pictures of contemporary life and then go on to revitalise the classics. They were going to be the leaders of the profession.

It is a commonplace to say that they, like Richard Burton before them, have proved lost leaders. But Finney has been less lost than the others. His public image has always been milder, sometimes in. the news for womanising (he has

been twice married and divorced), but not for drinking. He has seemed disciplined, and he has emerged as a different kind of actor: not a doomed Celtic prophet but a solid comic pragmatist, with a puzzled awareness of pain. He has organised his career in slabs, taking long absences from the theatre to make films, from the cinema to do plays, and from both in order to travel exotically. (A couple of years ago he and Diana Quick were briefly feared to have been lost up the Amazon.) It was after one such absence, in 1965, that he entered the National Theatre, disdaining the offer of pre-arranged star parts with the memorable words “I’ll play as cast.” He stayed for| 18 glorious months.

It was the high noon of Olivier’s regime and Finney was an integral part of it: if Olivier was to have a successor as actor-director of the National he would have been the only choice. He was the kingpin of Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” (still regarded by many people as the funniest show they have ever seen) and did a delightful camp cameo in Peter Shaffer’s “Black Comedy,” but his influence seemed to permeate even the plays he wasn’t in. When he left, the company’s fortunes took a long dip. Ten years later he was back, to lead Peter Hall’s actors into the new theatre on the South Bank.

Between 1975 and 1978 he played one leading role after another, all of them under Hall’s direction. His Hamlet was, to use the standard euphemism, controversial; it was tough and unkempt (as the text suggests) but excitingly conveyed the race of the hero’s mind across conventional frontiers. He did all with the marathon role of Tamburlaine that one could reasonably expect but no more — which, paradoxically, means that he was slightly less than one had hoped for. He was a good Lopahin in “The Cherry Orchard” but a terribly flat Macbeth. He had insisted on playing the role but one senses the relief when he turned to his one modem role at the National — a John Huston facsimile in the movie-making comedy, “Has Washington Legs?” During both his National stints Finney stood in for other actors in supporting roles. That kind of ensemble work he clearly enjoys and it makes him popular with colleagues and audiences. Hall’s Diary is full of appreciations of Finney as a company man, a morale-builder, a star; but also hints that their relationship deteriorated after “Macbeth.” Finney also had a spell as an associate director at the Royal Court, but he did few actual shows there, and though his commitment to a theatre can be intense it usually operates under a time limit.

Movie stars are proverbially restless, and he remains bankable: having fun as Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express,” or Daddy Warbucks in “Annie,” an

anguished success as the raging husband in “Shoot the Moon,” tipped for an Oscar as the old actor in “The Dresser.” (A sign of the times: Albert Finney at 47 playing old.) He has also had a fling as a singer-songwriter, and a more substantial stab at filmdirecting with “Charlie Bubbles.” And for years, as founder and codirector of the Memorial Enterprises production company, he has been a quietly effective showbusinessman.

His latest venture draws many of his interests together. It is United British Artists, a co-opera-tive mainly of performers (others include Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith) to get on plays, movies, and videotapes according to their own tastes and without benefit of subsidy. It reasserts Finney as an actor among actors, and it is typical of him — or of the Royal Court, New Actor side of him — that the first production, at Riverside Studios, should be a sober documentary on the Steve Biko inquest which he directs and in which he appears. Next comes the showier role of Sergeant Musgrave in a revival of the Arden play at the Old Vic. The part — a disciplinarian possessed by a cause — could be ideal for him.

He has not betrayed his early promise but he has not yet fulfilled it either. To qualify as a great actor you have to set your seal on a great role — to make others afraid of following you in it — and that he has yet to do.