Word: finney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...screen. Adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his rumbustiously original first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is easily the best British movie since Room at the Top-a loud, hilarious, indignant, contented, malodorous belch of prosperous protest from the British working class. What's more, in Albert Finney (TIME, Feb. 24), the picture introduces a fiery young (24) larrikin Olivier of singular charm and histrionic talent-at the moment the most brilliant actor of his age in the English-speaking world...
...Finney plays the part of Arthur Seaton, a machinist in a Midlands mill who slaves away at the lathe all week, but on Saturday night it's down to the pub for a glorious case of the screaming ab-dabs. After putting away ten pints of beer, Arthur falls blissfully down a flight of stairs, staggers home with a friend's wife (Rachel Roberts), wakes up next morning just in time to walk out the front door as the friend walks in the back. Off to a bar, he spots a little bit of all right (Shirley Anne...
...Finney has two seasons at Stratford-on-Avon already behind him. As Olivier's understudy there, he went into Coriolanus when Sir Laurence went out with a slipped knee cartilage, carried off the part with a brilliant blend of boisterousness and truculence. Since then, he has been a wild Teddy Boy in The Lily White Boys, a suitably complex Oedipus in a BBC production of Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, and a robust and lyric Romeo in a Caedmon recording of Romeo and Juliet (with Claire Bloom), scheduled for U.S. release soon. But throughout Britain...
Kippers & Champagne. Like Olivier, Finney is immensely versatile, is as good in modern plays as costume drama, and has a range of diction from Queen's English to Britannic Brando. But he has none of the smooth gloss of the classical acting tradition. He is relentlessly naturalistic, and his technique seldom shows on the surface. Like Look Back in Anger's star, Kenneth Haigh, Finney typifies the antiromantic, non-U hero who has emerged from the new social realism of the British theater. But as the rough and uneducated Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham lathe operator who fairly hums...
...Lancashire bookie, Finney was raised in the same Manchester suburb where Playwright Shelagh (A Taste of Honey) Delaney grew up, did so badly in school that his headmaster finally recommended that he become an actor "as a desperate move to get rid of me." He did so well at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art that he won a spot with the excellent Birmingham Repertory Company, where Charles Laughton found him and helped get him his job at Stratford. He has turned down five long-term movie contracts, did Saturday Night and Sunday Morning on a one-film basis...