FRANK FINLAY

(6 August 1926 - 30 January 2016)

The Lancashire-born actor originally trained as a butcher, his father’s profession, before taking to the stage. Playing in his local theatre in Farnworth, he met his future wife Doreen. After working in rep at Guildford, he attended RADA and later began at the Royal Court Theatre in London in plays by John Arden, Chekhov, Arnold Wesker’s trilogy and eventually Wesker’s Chips with Everything. His early work was mostly in the theatre with Laurence Olivier at Chichester and in the National Theatre at The Old Vic. He famously played Iago to Olivier’s Othello and repeated his role in the film version, for which he was Oscar-nominated. He had very wide experience on stage in plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Sean O’Casey, Trevor Griffiths and Ben Travers, and played Salieri in the first production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. He was in John Osborne and Anthony Creighton’s Epitaph for George Dillon and Eduardo Di Filipo’s Filumena at the National and in New York. Occasional excursions into musical theatre included the short-lived Kings and Clowns by Leslie Bricusse in 1978, playing Henry VIII, and the David Essex musical Mutiny! (1985) in which Finlay was Captain Bligh.

On television he was memorable in the title roles of Dennis Potter’s Casanova and The Death of Adolf Hitler by Vincent Tilsley. His TV series Bouquet of Barbed Wire and its sequel, Another Bouquet, ruffled a few feathers with its intimations of incest. Further appearances on TV were in Count Dracula and Sherlock Holmes and he won Baftas for his Sancho Panza in Don Quixote with Rex Harrison, and as Voltaire in Candide. He was even in Blackadder and made memorable appearances on The Morecambe & Wise Show and with The Two Ronnies. Other TV appearances were in Z Cars, One Way Pendulum, Les Misérables, Life Begins (with Anne Reid), Prime Suspect (with Helen Mirren), Doctor Who and many more.

Frank Finlay was in films from 1962 including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Private Potter (both with Tom Courtenay), A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree (playing Lestrade in both), Robbery, The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Molly Maguires, Gumshoe with Albert Finney, three Three Musketeers films and Shaft in Africa with Richard Roundtree, The Wild Geese, The Return of the Soldier with Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates and Richard Eyre’s The Ploughman’s Lunch. Of his more recent films The Statement with Michael Caine, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Roger Goldby’s The Waiting Room were probably the most interesting. Frank Finlay received the OBE in the 1984 New Year’s Honours List.

MICHAEL DARVELL