William finley

Born on September 20, 1942, New Yorker William Franklin Finley studied at Columbia University, where he became close friends with one of his classmates, future filmmaker Brian De Palma . Finley was very tall, as he measured 193 centimeters, which was a difficulty when it came to giving him roles. However, he managed to be recruited for various productions on the New York scene.

He debuted on the big screen at the hands of De Palma in Woton’s Wake , and later they both turned to feature film with Murder à la Mod , which showed the murder of a young woman from the point of view of the victim, and of the two suspects, one of them an enigmatic individual played by Finley, who also composed the main theme of the soundtrack.

The Wedding Party had more impact , that tape in which a very young 20-year-old Robert De Niro appeared in the credits as ‘Robert Denero’. Finley was assigned to play a friend of the groom.

On stage, Finley was the god Dionysus in a particular version of “The Bacchae,” Euripides’ tragedy, put on by The Performance Group, an experimental company. De Palma worked as director of a filming of the theatrical production. In his thriller Sisters , indebted to the work of Alfred Hitchcock , he too took advantage of Finley, as the psychiatrist ex-husband of Margot Kidder ‘s character .

But Finley’s most remembered role would be the lead in the rock musical The Ghost of Paradise , where the Italian-American filmmaker lashed out at the record industry, with a story halfway between “Faust”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Ghost of the opera”. Finley embroidered the portrait of Winstow Leach, a composer whose work was stolen by a powerful magnate, which will be performed at the inauguration of El Paraíso, a monumental theater. After an accident in which his face is disfigured, he sneaks into the venue to sabotage the assembly.

When De Palma began to succeed on a large scale, especially after the enormous success of Carrie , he remembered much less about the fetish actor of his early days, although they remained friends. He offered him a major supporting role in The Fury , where he was one of the guys with psychic powers.

Tobe Hooper , director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , also took advantage of Finley in two low-budget productions. He played a deranged man in Deathtrap , and an alcoholic wizard in House of Horrors . The actor’s last major job was playing one of the mad scientists who experiment on a patient, turning him into a nearly indestructible psychopath who will put the local sheriff ( Chuck Norris ) in trouble, in Silent Fury .

Since then, little has been done in the cinema. He was involved in the series Tales from the Crypt , Sabrina, the Things of Witches and Masters of Horror , while De Palma included him to pay homage to himself in The Black Dahlia , where the interpreter appeared on screen for the last time.

Finley attended an event known as Phantompalooza, organized in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, one of the few places in the world – along with Paris and little else – where The Phantom of Paradise was profitable . In Winnipeg, those who are most passionate about the film meet periodically, and it ran for 62 weeks there.