Cinema Retro has received the following press release from the History Press, UK in relation to the publication of a major new book about the life and career of Albert Finney by author Gabriel Hershman.
Ask
any actor or director of a certain age who was the most influential actor in
British cinema and theatre post-1960 and one name will immediately spring to
mind. ALBIE!
More than any other British actor Albert Finney was
responsible for the so-called New Wave, giving free rein to working-class
self-expression in cinema, especially in the landmark film Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning.
Other actors of the same ilk followed: Michael Caine,
Richard Harris, Malcolm McDowell, Terence Stamp and John Thaw, to name but a
few. But Finney was the original pathfinder, as all the above would have
acknowledged, his name synonymous with other British cultural mould-breakers of
the Sixties, such as John Osborne, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and George
Best.
Finney was also a supreme professional whose behaviour on
and off set - his perfectionism and precision - is often cited as the perfect
role model for others. Yet Finney is perhaps not as famous as his influence
would suggest. It is remarkable how he became the key figure in post-war
British film, a byword for the new style of acting, without selling his soul or
losing his privacy.
‘I like to observe people rather than be observed,’
Finney once said.
Albert Finney’s name has resonated through the West End
and five decades of film-making but Finney the man remained largely hidden from
view - watchful, chameleon-like, the unnoticed watcher in the woods. A
character actor who managed to submerge beneath the roles he played to portray
such truthful and compelling characters: the surly Arthur Seaton, a sly
Scrooge, a senile ‘Sir’, a drunken yet heroic consul, a cantankerous Churchill
and a curmudgeonly lawyer in Erin Brockovich.
Finney is the one figure everyone genuflects to -
the godfather of modern British film. His influence, even in retirement, still
resonates in all discussions about acting in Britain right up to the present.
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