Albert Finney: The British actor Robert De Niro and Gary Oldman call the greatest
Over the last half-century and across a sea of genres, Robert De Niro and Gary Oldman have garnered a murderer’s row of memorable performances and dredged a path many young grasshoppers have endeavoured to traverse.
De Niro established an early reputation for method acting, and though he’s loosened up over the years, the punches in his performances never took a backseat. One of the more intense faces to rise during the 1970s New Hollywood movement, he blazed a trail through classics like The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull, mentored by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and his muse, Martin Scorsese. Now, in his twilight years, with eight Oscar nominations and two wins under his belt, it would be hard for anyone to argue with his status as one of the GOATs.
On the other side of the Atlantic, as it goes with British actors, Oldman too blossomed from treading the boards with the Royal Shakespeare Company, most notably as Rosencrantz. The mid-1980s saw him stage-diving into British film, after which he landed in Hollywood, and the ’90s saw him become one of the most famous faces in action cinema, primarily for embodying nightmare-fuel villains. The next two decades, he circled elder statesman territory, balancing recurring blockbuster parts in Harry Potter and The Dark Knight Trilogy with Oscar-tickling fare like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Darkest Hour.
Oldman, like De Niro, was famed for his commitment to the ‘method’ in his early career, and both were capable of blowing other presences off the screen with their ferocity. Despite growing up on different sides of the pond and De Niro being 15 years older, their acting styles have always shared commonality. It’s understandable, then, that their influences also have some crossover, with both stars choosing the same British thespian as one of their favourites to study for their craft.
When asked about his earliest acting inspirations in 1994, De Niro mused, “I was thinking actually some early English projects like Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Albert Finney”, explaining that, when he watched those kinds of films as a child, they were considered art pictures. However, when Oldman watched them at home in Blighty, they were known as ‘kitchen sink dramas’ and were very much part of the mainstream. He therefore counted Finney, who began his career around the same time these gritty, realistic dramas changed the industry in Britain, as one of his “heroes”.
Finney, with his boxer’s physique and bulldog face, marked himself out as somewhat left of the mainstream immediately. However, he had an intensity to his performances that couldn’t be denied, and an everyman charisma that must have resonated with the two younger actors to later follow in his footsteps. Finney was a symbol of the sweeping changes in filmmaking in the ‘60s and ‘70s and made all new frontiers seem possible.
As he got older, Finney often had a love-hate relationship with cinema and retreated to his first love of stage acting in the ‘70s. However, when you play Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and ‘Daddy’ Warbucks in Annie, you’ll always be indelibly etched in the minds of movie lovers forever.
He then experienced some of his greatest film successes in the last two decades of his life, with roles in hits like Erin Brockovich, Big Fish, The Bourne Ultimatum, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, as well as his final role in arguably the best James Bond movie, Skyfall. These performances proved once again what De Niro and Oldman had always known: Finney might just have been the best to ever do it.
