Peter Finch

The Full Biography

Peter Finch. Actor. The London-born Australian who made a newsroom scream into a civic weather, then died before the town could hand him the envelope.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a man in a raincoat, soaked, shouting that he is as mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore. The year was 1976. The picture was Network. What the still cannot show is Frederick George Peter Ingle Finch, born in South Kensington, raised in France and India and finally Sydney, a repertory actor who had already been a star in Australia when Hollywood learned his name, and a sixty-year-old who collapsed in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby the January after the shout.

He was born on September 28, 1916, in London. The household was not simple. George Ingle Finch, the chemist whose name he carried, was not his biological father. In middle age he learned that an Indian Army officer, Wentworth Edward Dallas Campbell, was. George took custody. The boy was raised for stretches by a grandmother, Laura, in Vaucresson, France, then in Adyar, near Madras, in a theosophical community, and for a time in a Buddhist monastery. He claimed Buddhism for the rest of his life. In 1926 he was sent to Australia, to a great-uncle at Greenwich Point in Sydney. He left school at fifteen. He was a copy boy at the Sydney Sun. He wanted a stage.

The first shop was not a studio. It was a sideshow spruiker at the Royal Easter Show, a hoofer with George Sorlie’s travelling troupe, a foil to the American comic Bert le Blanc. Radio found him. Hugh Denison’s BSA Players. Lawrence H. Cecil at the ABC, who coached him through 1939 and 1940. He was “Chris” on the Children’s Session and the first Muddle-Headed Wombat. He played husband-and-wife detective work with Neva Carr Glyn. He won Macquarie Awards after the war as the country’s leading radio actor. The first screen bits were Ken G. Hall comedies: Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), Mr. Chedworth Steps Out (1939).

The war put him in the Australian Army on June 2, 1941. Sergeant. Anti-aircraft. The Middle East. The Bombing of Darwin. Leave to act. The Rats of Tobruk (1944). Propaganda shorts. Concert parties. He narrated Jungle Patrol and Sons of the Anzacs. Discharged October 31, 1945. After it he co-founded the Mercury Theatre in Sydney, a company that put on plays in a glass factory and a hall, and he was, for a stretch, the most complete leading man Australian pictures had: A Son Is Born, Eureka Stockade (1949), a face the local industry could put on a poster without asking London’s permission first.

Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, touring with the Old Vic in 1948, saw him as Argan in The Imaginary Invalid on the factory floor of O’Brien’s Glass Factory. Olivier told him to come to England. He came. Harry Watt arranged an Ealing test. Train of Events (1949) made him a murderous actor. Olivier put him on the Old Vic stage in James Bridie’s Daphne Laureola opposite Edith Evans and signed him to a five-year contract. The Wooden Horse (1950). The Miniver Story. He played Iago to Orson Welles’s Othello. He had an affair with Leigh that the columns would not leave alone. He had stage fright. The camera asked less of the nerves. He gave the camera more of the work.

The door into a British public that could keep him was not Olivier. It was the pictures that followed. Walt Disney hired him as the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), opposite Richard Todd. Alexander Korda put him in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan and then, better, as the priest in The Heart of the Matter (1953), from Graham Greene, opposite Trevor Howard. Paramount sent him to Ceylon for Elephant Walk (1954). Vivien Leigh was the lead until a breakdown replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. The turbulence soured him on a Hollywood career. He would work there only when the part required it. Alec Guinness’s Father Brown (1954) gave him Flambeau and notices that said the cheekbones had a mind.

Rank signed him in 1954 to a seven-year contract and said, out loud, that they would build a major British star. The first comedies — Passage Home, Josephine and Men, Simon and Laura — did not. Then Jack Lee cast him as an Australian soldier in A Town Like Alice (1956), from Neville Shute, opposite Virginia McKenna. Pinewood stood in for Malaya. The picture was the third-most-popular film at the British box office that year. It won him his first BAFTA for Best Actor. Powell and Pressburger’s The Battle of the River Plate (1956), as Captain Hans Langsdorff, was hugely popular at home. Exhibitors voted him the seventh-most-popular British star of 1956. He went back to Australia for Ealing’s The Shiralee (1957), from D’Arcy Niland, a father and a child on the road, one of the parts he named as a picture he liked. Robbery Under Arms (1957) did less. He was still voted the third-most-popular British star of that year.

The Nun’s Story (1959), for Fred Zinnemann, opposite Audrey Hepburn, put him in a picture that asked for stillness. He was Dr. Fortunati, a man who does not convert and does not sneer. The picture was an enormous success. It established him internationally. He said, that August, that this and The Shiralee were the only two films he had done that he liked. He could do stillness. He could also do a man coming apart. The second gift is the one the last picture used.

The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) won him a second BAFTA. The picture was not popular. The playing was. No Love for Johnnie (1961), a Labour politician eating his own ambition, won a third. Rank wanted him opposite Dirk Bogarde in The Singer Not the Song. He directed a short instead, The Day (1960). He was first-cast as Julius Caesar in Cleopatra and filmed some London scenes under Robert Mamoulian; when the production slipped, he walked. Rex Harrison took the part. Two MGM pictures with Robert Stevens — I Thank a Fool (1962), In the Cool of the Day (1963) — did not restore the climate. The Pumpkin Eater (1964), with Anne Bancroft, a marriage as a weather system, did. Girl with Green Eyes the same year. Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), opposite James Stewart, is a desert that is also a shop: a crashed plane, a man who knows how to build, a performance the adventure people still name.

He supported the decade’s women without vanishing. Sophia Loren in Judith (1966). Melina Mercouri in 10:30 P.M. Summer (1966). Julie Christie in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), as Bathsheba’s solid farmer, the one the plot will not reward. The National Board of Review gave him Best Actor. Aldrich again: The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). The Red Tent (1970), as Umberto Nobile, an expensive international adventure. He was, for a stretch, the most complete imported leading man British pictures had: not pretty in the Hollywood sense, a voice that could be a blade, a face that photographed as a man who had already lived a first life in another hemisphere. Five BAFTAs would finally sit on the file. The American climate arrived last. The work had been going since the war.

Then Paddy Chayefsky wrote Howard Beale. Sidney Lumet shot him. Finch, who had already been many kinds of tired men, became a prophet in a corporate newsroom. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” is the picture’s line, not a memoir sentence. He played it as a breakdown that the network then packaged. That is the joke and the wound. The picture was a hit among people who write about pictures. It is also, still, a clip that evenings of protest borrow without paying Chayefsky residual courtesy.

No one lives more lives than the actor. When I played Lord Nelson I worked the poop deck in his uniform. I got extraordinary shivers. Sometimes I felt like I was staring at my own coffin.Peter Finch, shortly before he died

The turn is the envelope he could not hold. A lot of actors die in the middle of a run. He died at the exact moment the town had decided to love him most. The Australian years, the British years, Sunday Bloody Sunday — those are the career. The shout is the climate. A complete life holds both.

He married Tamara Tchinarova, a ballerina, in 1943; a daughter, Anita, in 1950; a divorce in 1959 after the Leigh weather became public. He married Yolande Turner in 1959; two children, Samantha and Charles, the son who would produce pictures. That marriage ended in 1965. On November 9, 1973, in Rome, he married Mavis “Eletha” Barrett. A daughter, Diana. Friends from the Australian years describe a professional who could drink and still hit the mark, a combination the last picture both used and was used by. He published poems. Kenneth Slessor put “Tell them” in Australian Poetry 1945. Finch told a biographer that no film award gave him the sense of fulfillment of seeing a poem in print. The Finch in that lobby was a man who had already been a climate and was now a body the run had spent. Both are the life.

The later years

The last chapter is short on a calendar and long on the work. It begins when Ian Bannen dropped out of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Finch took the part: a Jewish doctor in London in love with a younger man, Murray Head, who will not stay, while Glenda Jackson holds the other side of the triangle. There is no apology in the playing. There is a whole life in a kitchen. He was nominated for the Oscar. He won another BAFTA. The National Society of Film Critics named him Best Actor. The picture remains the specialists’ Finch — the one the shout sits on.

What followed the kitchen was not a victory lap. Something to Hide (1972) thinned. The musical remake of Lost Horizon (1973) was a disaster he did not pretend otherwise. Bequest to the Nation (1973) put him in Nelson’s uniform on a poop deck and gave him the shivers he described to a journalist. England Made Me (1973), from Graham Greene again, as an opportunistic financier. The Abdication (1974), a historical that did not take. He was a working actor in his late fifties, still owed a climate the town had not yet decided to grant.

The second marriage to the camera is the one the public kept.

• Rome, 1973 — he married Eletha. Diana was born. The household that would accept the envelope was already in place.
• New York and Los Angeles, 1975–76 — Chayefsky and Lumet asked him to read Howard Beale. He auditioned. He got the prophet.
• Network, 1976 — the raincoat, the window, the line. Faye Dunaway. William Holden. Robert Duvall. A satire that evenings of protest still steal.
• Raid on Entebbe, 1976 — Yitzhak Rabin, a television film shot after the shout. An Emmy nomination he would not be alive to hear.
• The road, January 1977 — talk shows. Quotes. A body that had already had warnings. He went to Los Angeles to do the rounds.

On January 13, 1977, he sat with Johnny Carson. George Carlin was on the same show and joked about death. The next day, in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with Sidney Lumet beside him, Finch had a heart attack and died. He was sixty. The Academy had not yet voted. He is buried at Hollywood Forever.

On March 28, at the 49th Academy Awards, the envelope said Peter Finch. Eletha walked out and took it. James Dean and Spencer Tracy had been nominated after death. Finch was the first actor to win Best Actor after death. Heath Ledger, a generation after, joined a list nobody wants to join. The shout played on the clips. The man was already gone. He did not get an elder lap. He got a masterpiece, a clip, and a morning in a hotel. What he did get, in the months between the picture and the lobby, was the strange fame of a man who has just become a sentence. The rounds killed him. That is a brutal sentence and a true one.

After he was gone

Every newsroom picture still pays him a tax. Every protest that borrows the line still owes Chayefsky and the man who shouted it. Australia still claims the first career. Sunday Bloody Sunday still teaches a young actor what a quiet kitchen can hold. Charles Finch produces. The five BAFTAs sit in the British file. The envelope is a footnote the clips will not shut up about. Hollywood Forever keeps the stone.

He came out of a scattered childhood, made a name in Sydney, took Olivier’s advice, played a doctor who would not apologize, shouted a writer’s line into a climate, and died in a lobby before the town could hand him the statue. If you only remember the shout, you have the still. If you remember Australia, the kitchen, and the order of the envelope, you have him.

Portrait: Trailer screenshot (I Thank a Fool, 1962) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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