Albert Finney

Albert Finney was born on May 9, 1936, in Salford, near Manchester in northwest England, the third child and first son of Alice Hobson, who left school at age 14 to work in a mill, and Albert Finney Sr., who made his living running bets on horse racing. The family lived at first in a rowhouse — the familiar cramped accommodation of the working classes in a region where the Industrial Revolution had spread a patina of grime, grit, and pollution over back-to-back homes separated by cobbled alleyways and streets. Overshadowed by the nearby northern metropolis of Manchester, Salford was known as a factory town and inland port, and its docklands became a target for German bombers during World War II. In 1941, when Mr. Finney was 5 years old, the family was bombed out of its rowhouse and moved to a genteel home across town. Mr. Finney starred with Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 tale of a power company pollution scandal. He played a pugnacious lawyer who hires the crusading title character (Ms. Roberts), and was again nominated for an Oscar. “Though Finney himself would later come to personify the working-class hero in several of his earliest roles,” Mr. Falk wrote, the move to a new area “confirmed a strictly lower-middle-class status for a family who was never really less than comfortably off.” As a high school student at Salford Grammar School, Mr. Finney displayed both a liking for the theater and a poor grasp of academic subjects. A teacher suggested that he apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art — Britain’s premier acting school, usually known as RADA — where he auditioned in 1953 and won a scholarship. By 20, he had completed his course at RADA and was playing parts in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at a repertory theater in Birmingham, in the English Midlands. He went on to play Henry V in the play of the same name — one of many Shakespearean roles that established his reputation on the stage. Besides Shakespeare, he had leading roles in plays by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, August Strindberg and John Osborne. Mr. Finney met Jane Wenham, a fellow actor, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1957. The couple married and had a son, Simon, who became a film technician. They divorced in 1961. Mr. Finney married the French actress Anouk Aimée in 1970. They divorced in 1978. He married Pene Delmage, a travel specialist, in 2006. He is survived by his wife, his son and two grandchildren. The low-budget “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” filmed on location in Nottingham and at Twickenham Studios, was Mr. Finney’s big break. Three years later, the critical and box-office success of “Tom Jones,” which won three Oscars including best picture, made him a millionaire at the age of 27. He took a 10-month break to travel the world for much of 1964. As Mr. Finney’s career unfolded, movies overlapped with stage plays. He appeared in the musical films “Scrooge” in 1970 and “Annie” in 1982, for which he shaved his head to play Daddy Warbucks. He made his American television debut in the role of Pope John Paul II in 1984. “I often wondered why I am an actor,” Mr. Finney told a television interviewer in 1962. He then seemed to answer the question, speaking of the profession as a very public form of escape. “I think I am always watching and balancing, and sort of tabulating my own emotions,” he said. “And the only way I can lose myself is when I’m acting.”