Like a lot of northern actors – think of Albert Finney or Billie Whitelaw – Frank Finlay, who has died aged 89, exuded a practical common sense. But he also had an extraordinary lightness on his feet that enabled him to glide across the stage like a dancer.
I first clocked Finlay when, as a theatre-mad teenager, I saw him in the opening season at the Belgrade, Coventry, in 1958. I especially recall him in Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet playing the president of Europe’s smallest country seeking to maintain “the balance of feebleness” between the big powers. After a spell at the Royal Court, Finlay was also part of the embryonic National Theatre company that Laurence Olivier founded at Chichester in 1963.
It was there that Finlay gave one one of his greatest performances, playing a charismatically corrupt councillor – a self-styled “Napoleon of the north” – in John Arden’s momentous study of local politics, The Workhouse Donkey. I remember to this day the play’s carnivalesque finale, in which Finlay as the disgraced hero was carried shoulder-high from the theatre by his chanting supporters: for a moment it seemed as if a new kind of Dionysiac drama was possible.
Olivier, who was sitting in front of me at the matinee I attended, obviously rated Finlay highly, since he made him an integral part of his National company at the Old Vic. Finlay was a wonderful Willie Mossop in Hobson’s Choice, a fine Iago to Olivier’s Othello – performing with a quiet realism that came into its own in the later film version – and a spry, nimble Joxer Daly to Colin Blakely’s Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock. But Finlay, who had a habit of appearing in many of my favourite modern plays, was at his superb best in Trevor Griffiths’s The Party, which marked Olivier’s farewell to the National in 1973. In this, Finlay played an itinerant northern playwright, closely modelled on David Mercer, and brought his habitual downright vigour to a speech in which he denounced our society’s ability to absorb protest, proclaiming “poverty is one of its best-favoured spectacles”.
Finlay was also excellent in Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Filumena partly because he was able to translate his understanding of working-class life to Eduardo de Filippo’s Neapolitan comedies. Another of his great gifts was to play European characters battered and wearied by experience, which is why he was natural casting as an exiled Czech communist in Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness – the first commissioned play to be staged in the Lyttelton theatre in 1976. Finlay went on to achieve deserved fame in TV series such as Bouquet of Barbed Wire and Casanova and to make his mark in movies but, to me, he remains one of the best stage actors of his generation: capable of embodying a robust, northern hard-headedness while moving with panther-like grace.
