ALBERT FINNEY

(9 May 1936 - 8 February 2019)

The Salford-born actor Albert Finney, who has died from a chest infection, aged 82, was a stage performer who graduated to the cinema and television with great popular success. He studied acting at Rada and on graduating joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had been directed by Charles Laughton, an actor he admired immensely, in Jane Arden’s The Party in 1958. At Stratford the following year, he took over the role of Coriolanus from Laurence Olivier. Tony Richardson from the Royal Court Theatre in London cast Finney in his first film, The Entertainer in 1960, which was quickly followed by Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which started a new trend in realism in British films. He won several awards for his portrayal of factory worker Arthur Seaton, including a Bafta for Most Promising Newcomer. The Oscar-winning film of Tom Jones followed, after Finney had turned down the title role in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. 
Other more commercial films followed, including The Victors, Night Must Fall, Two for the Road and The Picasso Summer, the last scripted by Ray Bradbury. Then Finney directed and starred in Charlie Bubbles with Liza Minnelli from a script by playwright Shelagh Delaney. Then he played Ebenezer in the musical film of Scrooge, followed by Gumshoe, Stephen Frears’s debut as a director in which Finney played a bingo-caller with fantasies of becoming a private eye. It was produced by Memorial Enterprises, the company Finney set up with the actor Michael Medwin, which also produced Charlie Bubbles, Lindsay Anderson’s if... and O Lucky Man! plus other film and theatre productions. Although Finney secured five Academy Awards nominations, for Tom Jones, Murder on the Orient Express, The Dresser, Under the Volcano and Erin Brockovich, he never won. He turned down offers of both a CBE and a knighthood, as he disagreed with the UK honours system.
Finney’s film career continued with, among other titles, The Duellists, Wolfen, Loophole, Annie, Shoot the Moon, Orphans, Miller’s Crossing, The Browning Version, A Man of No Importance, Traffic, Big Fish, A Good Year, two Jason Bourne films and Skyfall, the Bond movie that was Finney’s last film (in 2012). During his career, he also continued to work on stage for the National Theatre in plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Congreve, Strindberg, Beckett, Marlowe, John Osborne and Peter Nichols, and starred in Yasmina Reza’s Art, his  final work on stage (in 1997-98). On television he made his mark as Churchill in Hugh Whitemore’s The Gathering Storm, winning a Bafta, an Emmy and a Golden Globe. On TV he later played Pope John Paul II, was in The Endless Game mini-series, Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, and Karaoke and Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter, Nostromo, A Rather English Marriage and My Uncle Silas by H.E. Bates. Albert Finney has a son, Simon, a film cameraman, by his first wife, actress Jane Wenham. He was also married to the actress Anouk Aimḗe, and he married Pene Delmage in 2006.

MICHAEL DARVELL