The elusive star of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,’ ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Annie’ opens up
By David Rosenthal
Albert Finney, Shaved head, Warbucks, Annie
Albert Finney shows us his hair after been shaved for his role as 'Daddy' Oliver Warbucks in the movie version of 'Annie' , New York City, April 16th, 1981 (Photo by Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images) Yvonne Hemsey/Getty
“The question mark is a very important aspect of living.” —Albert Finney, March 1982
Albert Finney lives in a cul-de-sac.
It is a tiny, quiet street of connecting houses, white and neat, with the odd tricycle obstructing the narrow footpath. Finney’s home is on the left, the one with the yellow window boxes and no name on the bell. He’s in, you can tell; the jazz of Johnny Hodges and Gerry Mulligan comes wailing through the heavy door, bursting the morning calm.
It is Sunday in Chelsea, and Albert Finney is dressed for an easy day, a day like the day before, a day without work. A time when he lives less dangerously, less intensely than when he’s otherwise engaged.
This is a comfortable setting for this uncomfortable man whose hands are too large, whose face proclaims its forty-six years without vanity or shame.
[...]
Albert quits the film as the credits roll. He’s back to sport, but they’re already in the locker room. Enough of this. Upstairs. Let’s have some port, what do you say?
***
“What I do is resist seeming to be one thing,” Albert Finney is saying. “I may be deluding myself, but there is a sense of the rogue and vagabond, the strolling player, seeing what comes up — where do I want to go next, how do I feel. It actually means I don’t have to fit within society, into a particular mold. I like the sense that one might still be surprised by life.”
It is all said thoughtfully, if a bit matter-of-factly. Finney assays his life, this career in progress, with the detached objectivity of a critic viewing an old drama. He has considered it often, pondered long and hard; questions, questions, questions; a curiosity outstripping any compulsion for knowledge of self. “I think one always has doubts,” he says. “I always hated it when anybody suggested there ain’t no doubt. I mistrusted that.”
There is no certainty to Finney, just an abundance of vague mysteries that sometimes puzzle his colleagues and that he embellishes with unpredictable flights across the public eye. There he was, a star before his twenty-fifth birthday, the finest of his generation, they attested, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a film that revolutionized British cinema, already under his belt; Luther, a smash in London and on Broadway; Tom Jones awakening an entire generation to the virtues of youthful, bawdy lust. Approbation and multipicture deals danced seductively around his unswelled head. Lawrence of Arabia? He had already turned it down. David Merrick wanted him to stay in New York? Forget it. Well, what do you want to do, Albert? What is it you want?
Nothing.
[...]
“And I always wanted to wander,” he goes on. “I also think I’m good as an actor. I’m not saying I can act terrific or great, but I can act good. And what I’ve always believed is that I’ll get a job.”
[...]
“As a youth, it seemed relatively attractive to be the roaring boy,” he says on the highway. “You know, where you drank at the pub during lunchtime and then gave a performance. I went through a period where I thought, ‘Oh, yes, it’s terrific to be like that, to be John Barrymore,’ that kind of syndrome. I found the idea of it appealing, playing that role, but my system in those days — it’s got more hardened since — actually couldn’t cope with it. I used to go on these drinking sessions with various mates, and after a bit, they’d help me out of the bar so I could throw up somewhere.
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