Adieu, new Olivier

Albert Finney, who died at 82, preferred playing working-class heroes to classical roles. One of the new-style heroes and shooting stars of the 1960s, Finney, enjoyed a rich and varied career. Like Richard Burton before him and Kenneth Branagh after him, he was expected to become the new Laurence Olivier, the leader of his profession, on stage and on screen. However, it is not his fault that this did not happen. He worked intensely in two periods at the National Theatre, was an active film producer as well as occasional director, and remained a glowering, formidable presence in the movies long after he had been nominated five times for an Oscar (without ever winning one). From middle age onwards, and he was only 47 when he gave one of those Oscar-nominated performances, the fruity old actor was defying the blitz, in Peter Yates's The Dresser. Soon he was the new roaring boy of that high-spirited, colourful decade – cheeky, northern and working-class. He was born in Salford and as it happens, another northern "new wave" actor, Glenda Jackson was also born that day. Young Albert flunked his exams but played leading roles in 15 school plays and went south to London and Rada, where he was in a class that included Peter O'Toole, Tom Courtenay, Frank Finlay, among others. While still a student, as Troilus in a modern play, he was spotted by Kenneth Tynan, the best-known critic of the day, who proclaimed a "smouldering young Spencer Tracy, who will soon disturb the dreams of Messrs Burton and Scofield". And so it proved. His rise was instant and meteoric. He played Brutus, Hamlet, Henry V and Macbeth at the Birmingham Rep, and in 1956 made his London debut in the Old Vic's production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. In 1958 he played opposite Charles Laughton in Jane Arden's The Party at the Arts theatre. He followed Laughton to Stratford, joining a stellar company and played Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He also understudied Olivier as Coriolanus. But Finney was a modern actor not really destined for classical eminence. At the Royal Court he took the lead roles in a satirical musical, The Lily White Boys, directed by Lindsay Anderson. He made his film debut opposite Olivier in The Entertainer in 1960. A pattern of oscillation between theatre and cinema was soon established,as he bookended his first major stint at the National, in the great Olivier company, with screen appearances in Reisz's 1964 remake of Emlyn Williams's psychological thriller Night Must Fall and Stanley Donen's delightful study of a disintegrating relationship, in flashback and fast forward, Two For the Road (1967). Finney's leading lady in the latter, Audrey Hepburn, was not the first nor last of his amorous work-and-pleasure intrigues. He acted in many more films and plays and would be remembered as one of the best actors that emerged from Britain.