Strolling Player by Gabriel Hershman

Author:Gabriel Hershman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750981873
Publisher: The History Press

16

STOP THAT TRAIN!

Once he’s assumed the disguise, he’s a different man.

Tom Courtenay (as Norman) on Finney (as Sir).

We don’t like to think of actors’ deaths, but when a great star finally takes to the celestial stage, news bulletins tend to run a valedictory clip showing the performer at the peak of his or her powers. For me, Finney’s finest moment on-screen comes when he issues a thunderous, even volcanic, command that halts a departing train in The Dresser.

Acting students would do well to study this thumbnail illumination of character. Courtenay – breathless, prissy, effeminate, begging and pleading – is pushed aside like a poodle yapping at someone’s heels as he reasons with the driver. Then we catch sight of Finney as Sir, surrounded by his luggage-laden players, striding briskly and proudly, stick and chin thrust forward, clearing a path. When Sir raises his stick and brings the wheels of the train screeching to a halt with a stentorian roar – ‘Stop that train!’ – Finney is fleetingly showing what this great actor was before old age debilitated him.

It was just as well that Finney was still living in London, not Hollywood, because The Dresser might not have come his way. By 1982 he was sharing a mews house with Diana in Chelsea. Diana had knocked down some walls while Finney had been away and redecorated the house, painting the living room apricot. Visitors noted few theatrical mementoes. Instead, photographs from their trip to Macchu Piccu in 1979 lined the mantelpieces.

Finney liked to live well but, unlike other stars, had resisted moving to America. He felt that London offered him the ideal balance between theatre and film:

It’s much easier in England than America. London is the centre for theatre, film, television and radio. In America, the theatre and the movie industry have two different centres. An actor has to make a decision where to live. If he wants principally to be a stage actor, he stays in New York. But then if he wants to try movies, he has to move his family 3,000 miles. We don’t have that problem in England.

His other reason for staying in the UK was that he felt that, in America, a commercially successful film brought untold pressures on its leading actor:

In America, there’s pressure to stay on the treadmill and follow up a movie with a more successful movie. That’s impossible of course. Nobody’s career has ever continued to go upward and onward without a few backward steps. The graph of any life fluctuates. All graphs go up and down. Look at the great acting careers in England – Olivier and Gielgud and Richardson. They’re working actors. They don’t worry that they shouldn’t do theatre or television because they’re movie stars. Picasso didn’t paint a masterpiece every time he stepped up to the easel; sometimes he just did little sketches, but he kept working. That’s how Richardson, Olivier and Gielgud feel. If they’re not doing a movie or play they’ll do a television play or radio play, just to practise their craft.

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