Albert Finney Biography

Albert Finney was the respected theater and film actor whose career stretched from Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1950s to the James Bond movie Skyfall in 2012. He was five times nominated for an Academy Award, most notably as the free-living, free-loving youth Tom Jones in the 1963 film of the same name.

Albert Finney was born near Manchester, England and graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1956. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and began appearing on the London stage, then made his film debut with a small role in the 1960 film The Entertainer (starring Laurence Olivier).

Intense, crookedly handsome, and by turns tragic, whimsical, or pugilistic, Finney was best known for drama but played all kinds of characters: A singing Scrooge in Scrooge (1970), a hard-drinking factory worker in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a troubled husband in the romance Two For the Road (1967, with Audrey Hepburn), Agatha Christie‘s persnickety detective Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Daddy Warbucks in Annie (1982), an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Under the Volcano (1984). At his death in 2019, The Guardian called Finney “an almighty force on screen: a clenched fist of physicality, a battering ram of uningratiating power.”

Besides Tom Jones, his other Academy Award nominations were for  Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), Under the Volcano (1984); and Erin Brockovich (2000). He never won the Oscar, but did win an Emmy for portraying Winston Churchill in the 2002 TV drama The Gathering Storm. Among his many theater honors, he won an Olivier Award as best actor in 1986 for the drama Orphans.