Finney’s Fortunes : Once afraid of being labeled a mere sex symbol, now-avuncular Albert Finney has found success in frumpy roles as in ‘Rich in Love’

Around. And around. And around. Forget about the blistering just-before-summer heat. Who cares about the fading light of late afternoon rapidly descending into early evening? All is quiet as what appears to be a paunchy, rumpled over-the-hill Southern suburbanite does the major stunt of “Rich in Love,” the latest small movie from the “Driving Miss Daisy” team of producers Richard and Lili Zanuck and director Bruce Beresford, which opens Friday.

Actually, the stunt--if you can call it that--consists of Albert Finney riding a lawn mower in circles on the lawn. Not exactly the sort of stuff to worry “The Last Action Hero” or “Cliffhanger.”

“But then I’m no Schwarzenegger or Stallone, now, am I?” Finney guffaws.

Suddenly, he tries a wheelie and sort of pulls it off.

“Hah!” he shouts, triumphant.

“Atta boy, Albert,” yells one of the crew.

“Good luck, Albert,” laughs another.

With that, the crew have a hard time getting Finney off the mower.

And yet, once upon a time, Finney was as much of a movie star--and certainly a helluva better actor--as Arnold or Sly. Indeed, this 56-year-old English thespian was one of the great heartthrobs of the silver screen along with several other working-class-type actors who seemed to dominate British theater and cinema in the 1960s.

But it’s been 30 years since the release of “Tom Jones,” the adaptation of Henry Fielding’s novel about a young lad’s bawdy adventures and misadventures in 18th-Century England, which firmly established Finney as not just an amazing craftsman, but also as a hunk of the month. He had style, he had flair, he had great looks, he even had great hair (all long and curly and messy). Not to mention the fact that Finney spent most of the movie buttoning up his pants. Why, the infamous eating scene still ranks right up there in sexual potency with Kevin Costner’s limousine ride in “No Way Out.”

But today, Finney’s face, once firm, sags. No longer slim, he now has jowls. His dimples, once pronounced, are diminished. And the body, well, is not exactly buff. Even the sexual magnetism is gone. Instead his appeal is mainly amiability along the lines of a favorite uncle. But one look at Finney’s long career and the current crop of leading men such as Costner, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Richard Gere actually may breathe easier with every gray hair. For, if they are very lucky and, more importantly, have the talent, today’s sex symbols can end up in tomorrow’s character roles. For that’s where Finney now finds himself--incredibly busy, making one movie after another, playing deliciously meaty parts and, even better, stealing every scene he’s in.

“A lot of people fall by the wayside, if you want to term it that way. But that’s the nature of the business. Some people, perhaps, burn too intensely, too quickly or something. But I’ve always viewed it as a life, you see. And the graph of any career, given that it does continue, fluctuates,” Finney explains, introspective now that he is ensconced in his location chair as the sun dips below the horizon and the crickets begin singing.

“Sometimes, that fame, talent and personality is not sought out. But it isn’t necessarily the end of it. You maybe will get another chance.”

And what decides that?

“In a sense, you don’t have any say in it. Perhaps fate decides that,” he states matter-of-factly. “I think you’ve got to want it, really want it, and I always have. I enjoy the challenges of acting and the fun of it and all that. And I want it to just keep going. I mean, I’m just past halfway really, and,” he adds, grinning, “with a bit of luck I’ll still be in the movies another 30 years’ time.”

This is not a man who spends much time wincing before a mirror. Or, for that matter, looking back longingly on his days as a romantic leading man in, say, “Two for the Road” opposite the late Audrey Hepburn. No doubt, it’s because he never did see himself as particularly handsome, no matter how many women might disagree. And he’s aware of the irony since, when “Tom Jones” was doing blistering box office and Finney’s career took off, his main concern was making sure the movie industry did not see him as just another pretty face. That was why after the movie’s immediate success in 1963, to the dismay of his fans (not to mention his agent), Finney took off an entire year to travel around the world with his girlfriend.

That “overreaction” to being treated like some kind of sex symbol also was why in 1974 at just 37 years old, Finney--still quite fabulous looking--decided to disappear into the role of the fat, fussy Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” and earn the first of two Oscar nominations for best actor and start on a string of character roles.

No matter. His “Rich in Love” co-star, fellow veteran Piper Laurie, admits that when she looks at Finney even today, she still gets goose bumps. “Of course, I’ve seen all his movies and I saw him in the theater a lot and, well, I had a crush on him,” she recalls, smiling. “It’s hard to get over that, you know.”

Yet the character that Finney plays in “Rich in Love,” Warren Odom, is the male version of a frump. Unconscious of long-simmering trouble in his marriage, he is stunned when he finds out that his wife has left home. So stunned, in fact, that he’s convinced she’s lost or kidnaped. So he quickly embarks on an embarrassingly desperate search for her, helped by his beloved teen-age daughter Lucille, who knows the truth: that her mother left home to start a “second life” because she was disgusted with the first one.

Immediately, Warren Odom starts unraveling. While most leading men go to great lengths to cover up every imperfection, from hiding bald spots to using shoe lifts, few would dare to purposely look as awful as Finney does for the camera. But, sagging around the house in pajamas, stuffing food into his face in comical combinations, the actor milks every discouraged moment in the trials of a true Southern eccentric as only two homegrown writers can paint one, novelist Josephine Humphreys and screenwriter Alfred Uhry.

For instance, Finney’s character can’t even lift his head from his depression long enough to notice his daughter has missed her high school graduation to help him look for her mother. “Well,” is all Finney replies, “I didn’t want it to interfere with your education.” It was scenes such as this, Finney says, that attracted him to the work. “It’s kind of a complicated weave. And it just made me smile too.”

Which is why, when his character’s metamorphosis back to the land of the living starts to happen, thanks to meeting the chatty hairdresser Vera Delmage, played by Laurie, you can almost sense Finney’s disappointment, for now the movie focuses less on Finney and more on the younger members of the Odom family, who have their own troubles galore.

Needless to say, Finney was the first actor approached to play the role by both Beresford and the Zanucks. “Generally, when you’re looking for actors in their 50s, just about all the ones working are pretty good or they wouldn’t have been working so long,” Beresford says. “But you get some actors who can’t convey what the others can. We needed an actor with an emotional range. Albert had it.”

The only hitch in Beresford’s mind was whether Finney, being English, could do the Southern accent. “No problem whatsoever,” replies a confident Richard Zanuck, who knew of Finney’s amazing talent for mimicry dating back to childhood when Finney would do all the voices for puppet shows. Indeed, in both the stage and film versions of “Orphans,” Finney played a gangster from Chicago, with a South Side accent as genuine as that city’s deep-dish pizza.

Far easier was his Irish brogue in “The Playboys,” as the local police sergeant of a small Irish village in 1957. In love with a strong-willed unmarried mother who winds up falling for an itinerant actor, Finney plays his cop like “a clenched fist,” said one reviewer, but also with genuine suffering beneath his rages.

Like “Rich in Love,” this film, too, lingered on the love life of the younger actors, Robin Wright and Aidan Quinn, presumably to attract a wider theatergoing audience. After all, Finney isn’t exactly a household name among younger generations. One time, when he was promoting “Annie,” in which he played the Mr. Clean lookalike Daddy Warbucks, Finney couldn’t help but shrug when two giggling teen-age girls thought he acted in TV commercials.

Nevertheless, Finney always has been a darling of the critics. “It’s Finney who becomes “The Playboy’s” dominant presence,” gushed one. “Finney simply walks off with ‘The Playboys’ entirely,” said another.

Actually, Finney wandered into acting. The youngest of three children, he grew up in the northern English town of Salford, the son of a bookie.

Beginning at age 9, Finney used to act in plays at school, more out of instinct than any driving ambition to be an actor. What he did not do was homework, which he felt to be an infringement on his personal freedom. Finally, he did so poorly on his school exams that his headmaster suggested he try the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Finney, who didn’t even know there was such a place, auditioned and won a scholarship. Still, it was two terms later that it first dawned on him that acting could be his life.

His colleagues there were Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates (with whom some American audiences still confuse Finney, for some reason) and Brian Bedford. All wanted to be the “next Olivier,” and in fact Finney did understudy Sir Laurence in “Coriolanus” at Stratford around that time. One night, a knee injury forced Olivier off the boards. When the manager announced this to the audience, a groan went up. Finney, brash and bold, didn’t care then or when he and Bates made their film debuts in “The Entertainer,” an Olivier vehicle.

Maybe Finney knew it would be his time soon. In 1960, he burst upon the screen as the roguish Nottingham factory worker in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”

“That was really a film that made a tremendous impact on me because of its realism,” director Beresford recalls. “And Albert’s performance was so earthy, I couldn’t believe he was an actor. I thought, well, they’ve gotten some kid and made him play this. It was just amazing.”

Combined with “Tom Jones,” Finney’s screen image quickly became that of a young rogue. Part of that was his own doing. In the ‘60s, stories abounded about Finney’s hard-drinking bouts with his chums Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole. Referring genteelly to that time period as a “great deal of wildness,” Finney explains that he had this stupid romantic notion that to be a great actor on the order of John Barrymore or Edmund Kean, he had to be careless with his talent and bent on self-destruction. Some may have thought that was the reason he turned down the lead in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Actually, Finney was turning down the studio contract--one of Hollywood’s seven-year servitudes, to be exact.

“I knew at the time that I wasn’t quite impressed by the films they did anyway. I didn’t think that was for me. And it wasn’t what may have been seen as stubborn or awkward or rebellious,” Finney relates. “What I wanted to do was try and find my own path and to feel the reins were as much as possible in my own hands.”

In 1967, “Two for the Road” solidified Finney’s status both as an anti-hero and a romantic leading man opposite the late Hepburn (with whom Finney had a passionate romance). The next year, Finney not only starred in but directed (for the one and only time), “Charlie Bubbles.” Rather forgettable, it is remembered by film history buffs more as the screen debut of Liza Minnelli. As it happens, Finney didn’t like directing and reserved his attempts for the stage.

It was there that, in the ‘70s, Finney sought refuge from Hollywood. From 1974 to 1978, he concentrated on performing in the classics with the National. Not only did producers in Hollywood forget about the actor, they thought he had passed away or entered a sanitarium. Or worse--become a stubby, dark-haired, mustachioed Belgian detective after he won his best actor nomination for “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1974.

When Finney did return almost full time to films, his first three--”Loophole,” “Wolfen” and “Looker”--were embarrassments. Then in 1982 he was cast in “Annie,” though he was not producer Ray Stark’s first choice. But Sean Connery wouldn’t play totally bald and Cary Grant declined. So Finney pocketed a reported $1-million salary. After that, or maybe even because of that, Finney seemed to reach a turning point in his career and never did another B movie.

“I think one’s salary should be related to the budget of the film. Of course, sometimes people get their priorities wrong,” he muses. “And they say they have to have certain pertinencies because it helps them feel secure. But I didn’t come into the business to make money. I didn’t think by being an actor I’d be rich. I’d just thought I’d have a good life and I’d enjoy it. I mean, I happened to have made some money, but that, in a sense, is icing on the cake.”

More than the big-budget “Annie,” Finney remains extremely proud of another movie he did that year that few people saw, “Shoot the Moon,” one of the best films about divorce ever made and something of a cult rental at video stores. Playing a Marin County writer whose marriage to Diane Keaton is disintegrating, Finney was once quoted as saying that his combative scenes with Keaton “reminded me of times when my own behavior has been monstrous”--a reference to his many affairs with women (including, reportedly Keaton during the filming of the movie) as well as two divorces.

“Doing something like ‘Shoot the Moon’ actually is not pleasurable because all the time you’re thinking about the downside of relationships,” Finney confides. “And so you’re subconsciously reminding yourself of times in your own life when you’ve had the blues or whatever.”

Yet Finney goes from a seemingly gentle man to a near-homicidal maniac with believability, if not poignancy--especially in a scene at the end of the movie when, crazed with jealousy that his wife and children seem to be getting along fine without him even though he left them in the first place, he crashes his car into a party on their newly built tennis court. Ramming the court again and again and then looking emotionally spent by the outpouring of rage: This is quintessential Finney.

Why he has never won a best actor Academy Award is perplexing to many.

“That’s not my yardstick. It might be yours, not mine,” he says succinctly. “I think it’s wrong to get too attached to prizes or to guns, medals and diplomas, either.” He came closest to an Oscar in 1986 for his performance as the alcoholic ex-British consul in John Huston’s uneven adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano.” Trivializing what surely was a difficult task in having to play drunk for almost the entire length of the movie, he claims that, to prepare, he would remove himself from the rest of the cast and “just sway slightly to get used to the idea.”

More recently, Finney wasn’t the first choice to play the crime kingpin in the Coen brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing.” But actor Trey Wilson, who had worked with the Coens in “Raising Arizona,” had an aneurysm, and Finney’s name happened to come up. His deal was done in a week. Finney also is much in demand on television, beginning in 1982 when he played Pope John Paul II for a CBS television special and aged from 28 to 59. Since then he has gravitated to the cable networks--as a British agent in Showtime’s “The Endless Game”; as the star of “The Green Man,” the Kingsley Amis novel adaptation for the Arts & Entertainment Network; and as a Mike Wallace-like TV news magazine anchor in HBO’s “The Image.” If it appears that he hardly ever stops working, that is because he doesn’t. Ideally, he looks for roles that, as he puts it, “invade my imagination.” But when he can’t find them, he’ll simply choose the best of the lot “to keep my engine running.”

He only occasionally acts the Bad Boy off-camera. Like the time in 1982 that Finney, plugging “Annie,” chain-smoked filter tips while sitting next to Herbert A. Allen Jr., the New York investment banker who then was also chairman of the board of Columbia Pictures, the studio that made “Annie.” Of course, Finney knew that Allen detested smoking. And that’s why Finney had a retort ready: “I smoke because Picasso smoked. And because Hitler didn’t,” the actor told Allen before lighting up a Montecruz cigar.

On location, Finney’s only “method” is to look so relaxed that he almost seems to nap. Or else he’s got his feet up studying a racing form (he owns thoroughbreds) in a legacy from his dad. Nor does he ever cop an attitude beyond cool confidence.

“I think of all the actors I’ve worked with, he’s the most aware of what’s necessary for film,” Beresford explains. “Because you get a lot of actors who, when you’re fiddling with the focus and you’re measuring distances, and they’ve got to lean this way or that, a lot of them seem to have an attitude that it’s all some kind of a trick to make things difficult for them. They think you’re not doing it in fact to make them look good. But Albert understands everything you’re doing and you don’t have to explain.”

Right then, an example of this plays itself out. Trying to finish the lawn-mower shot, operating in what has become almost total darkness, Beresford starts to explain what’s going on.

“Look, Albert, we’re doing this because . . . “

But Finney immediately interrupts.

“I know, love, I know. The sun was over there and now you have to get the shade here and the angle there so it’s necessary for me to stand on my elbow and lean out that way,” the actor says, changing his stance.

With that, he fixes Beresford with a huge grin.

“I understand perfectly.” And Finney does, over and over and over.