The First Finney

Audiences who fill London's Cambridge Theater to see a play called Billy Liar do well to mind their manners. Not long ago, the young leading actor turned on a chattering group in the stalls and said: "I'm up here working, so if you won't shut up, go home. And if you don't, I'm going home." No one left, for the audience had come to see Albert Finney, 24, who has been widely heralded in Britain as "the second Olivier."

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 he is best known as Arthur Seaton, hero of the film version of Novelist Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, an elaborately praised production that will give the U.S. its first full look at Albert Finney, when it opens here in a few weeks (he had a small part in The Entertainer).

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 with the joy of doing wrong, Actor Finney is far more believable than was Actor Haigh as angry Jimmy Porter, and is something of a reflection of Finney himself when he delivers the line: "I'd like to see anyone try and grind me down. I'm out for a good time. All the rest is propaganda." Finney is the offstage opposite of what he calls "the types who spend their time in theater clubs." He considers friends "a bit of a liability." Part quicksilver and part glunch, his boyish, good-looking face has the story of the Industrial Revolution written on it from pale, porridge cheeks to his shock of sandy hair. He seldom spends more than two nights in the same flat, chain-smokes, sometimes has kippers and champagne for breakfast.

Desperate Move. He generally goes around in a tieless flannel shirt, stovepipe trousers that somehow bag at the knees, a moldy, fur-lined leather coat ("I shot it myself"), and a workingman's cloth cap. But he wears a suit and tie to restaurants, so that he will not "have to perform as a rebel, put my feet on the table or something that would interfere with my eating." He simply fears "claustrophobia of the soul" (which may have helped cause him to separate from his wife, Actress Jane Wenham), thinks that too many British actors are preoccupied with respectability. "When I'm old, I want to be sorry for what I've done--not for what I've not done."

Son of a 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 for Playwright John Osborne's producing company. "I'm only 24," says Albie Finney, "and I want to feel free to gallop around. I don't particularly want to be an international star by the time I'm 30. And meanwhile, I don't want to be the second Olivier. I want to be the first Finney."

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