Albert Finney

From a very young age, Albert Finney showed great interest in the world of acting. Like many other British actors, he came to the movies through the theater. At the age of 22, after having worked for a small theater company, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. He thus became known while representing “Macbeth”, “Othello” or “King Lear” and grew as an actor. Two years later, in 1960, he made his big screen debut with a small role in Tony Richardson ‘s The Entertainer .

His big break came with Saturday night, Sunday morning , one of the best-known films in British Free Cinema. This current moved away from the artificiality of Hollywood and looked at the anonymous beings of society, those that the cinema had ignored until then. With this work and with Tom Jones , also from the same movement and for which he was nominated for an Oscar for best actor, Albert Finney became a sort of hero for the working class. And not only because of his characters, from a humble origin and with street problems, but also because he had grown up in a working-class family.

In 1967, he co-starred with Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road , a film about the ups and downs of marriage that would become a classic of romantic cinema. Finney had just shown that he was a very versatile actor with a wide range. At that time he had already gone through drama, comedy, war movies and thrillers, always with very satisfactory performances.

During the 70’s he worked in few films. However, it was at this time that he starred in an unforgettable film: Murder on the Orient Express , adaptation of the popular Agatha Christie novel directed by Sidney Lumet , with whom he would work again much later in Before the Devil Knows You’ve dead . His Hercules Poirot allowed him to be a detective, a role he had already played in Unlicensed Detective , which earned him his second Best Actor Oscar nomination.

By the 1980s, Finney was already an accomplished actor. However, far from resting on his laurels, he continued to star in successful films such as The Actor’s Shadow , in which he played a theater actor – a role that suited him like a glove if we take into account his long career on the stage. –, or Under the Volcano , one of the last films by John Huston . For them he was again nominated for an Oscar. He is also forced to cite his work with two little brothers who were beginning to stand out, the Coens, in Death Among the Flowers . Later, in the 90s, Albert would leave us his last films as a leading actor and then retire to supporting roles. the browning version, in which he gave a magnificent interpretation of a classical literature professor determined to awaken the sensitivity of his students, was his last great work as a protagonist.

Since 2000, Finney has participated as a leading secondary in a large number of films known to all: Erin Brokovich and Traffic , both directed by Steven Soderbergh , Big Fish (his best work in recent years), Amazing Grace ,  The Bourne Ultimatum or Skyfall . After more than forty years succeeding in film and theater, Finney is gradually retiring. The actor has been married three times, to actresses Jane Wenham – with whom he had his only child – and Ainouk Aimée, and currently with Penelope Dalmage. There is little left of that actor who fell in love with the English public at the end of the 60s, but his talent continues to shine when he appears on screen, and he has bravely fought the cancer that has been stalking him since 2011.