British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D 722. Photo: British Lion.
American postcard by Fotofolio, NY, NY, no. P 348. Photo: Phil Stern. Peter Finch in The Flight of the Phoenix (Robert Aldrich, 1965).
"If I was broke anyway, I might as well become an actor"
Peter Finch was born Frederick Peter Ingle-Finch in 1916 in London, Great Britain. Finch was the illegitimate child of Alicia Gladys Fisher and Wentworth Edward Dallas "Jock" Campbell, a Scottish Military officer. His mother was married at the time to Australian-born chemist and mountaineer George Ingle Finch, who officially assumed paternity.
After his parents' early divorce, Peter Finch grew up mostly with relatives in France, India and finally in his parents' native Australia. He grew up in Sydney, New South Wales. Finch didn't meet his mother until he was 33, and his natural father until he was 45.
After leaving school, he took numerous low-paid odd jobs in Sydney, including a brief spell as a reporter on the Sydney Sun. He eventually decided to become an actor. He later commented, "If I was broke anyway, I might as well become an actor." He first found employment in sketches within vaudeville shows. By the mid-1930s, Finch began to play more serious roles in the theatre and started to work in radio.
Finch's first on-screen performance was as Prince Charming in The Magic Shoes (Claude Fleming, 1935). The Australian short film was an adaptation of the Cinderella fairy-tale, and also starred Helen Hughes, the daughter of the Australian Prime Minister Morris Hughes. In 1938 Finch made his feature film screen debut in Dad and Dave Come to Town (Ken Hall, 1938). Other roles in Australian cinema followed, though without initially attracting international attention. He did, however, become one of the most popular actors in radio dramas in Australia, thanks to his pleasant voice.
From 1941 to 1945 he served with the Australian Imperial Force in World War II, partly in troop entertainment, and was latterly in the rank of sergeant. During one of his stage appearances shortly after the end of the war, he was spotted by Laurence Olivier who was conducting a tour of Australia with his theatrical company. He brought Finch to London to the Old Vic Theatre, where Olivier was artistic director at the time. Finch later had an affair with Olivier's wife, the actress Vivien Leigh. In London, Finch was soon able to make a name for himself in stage roles, for example in 1949 with a performance in 'Daphne Laureola' alongside Edith Evans, which received a standing ovation.
British publicity photo by J. Rank Organisation. Original signature.
British postcard in the Celebrity Autograph Series by Celebrity Publishers LTD., London, no. 246. Photo: J. Arthur Rank Organisation. Peter Finch in Simon and Laura (Muriel Box, 1955).
Propelled to stardom in British cinema
However, as Peter Finch had severe stage fright, from the 1950s onward he concentrated primarily on his film career, which had been sluggish until then. His first British production was Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt, 1949), although here he was still in a supporting role.
A year later he made a minor appearance in the Hollywood drama The Miniver Story (H.C. Potter, 1950), the sequel to the war drama Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942), both starring Greer Garson. In 1952, his portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Richard Todd in Walt Disney's The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (Ken Annakin, 1952) received some attention. This was followed by a series of leading roles that propelled him to stardom in British cinema in the mid-1950s.
In 1954, he signed a seven-year contract with the Rank Organisation worth £87,500 to make one film a year for them. "We are going to build Peter into a major British star", said Earl St. John, Rank's head of production, at the time. He protrayed an Australian soldier in the World War II drama A Town Like Alice (Jack Lee, 1956) starring Virginia McKenna. The film, mostly set in Malaya and almost entirely shot at Pinewood Studios, became the third-most-popular film at the British box office in 1956 and earned him his first British Film Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Actor in 1956. He later received the award three more times.
Finch's other roles included Elizabeth Taylor's husband in Elephant Walk (William Dieterle, 1954), the villain Flambeau in Father Brown (Robert Hamer, 1954) starring Alec Guinness, and German Captain Hans Langsdorff in The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1957) about the first major naval battle of World War II in which the British Navy destroyed the Graf Spee, a powerful German warship. This war film was also hugely popular in Great Britain, and British exhibitors voted Finch the seventh-most-popular British star at the box office for 1956.
Then Finch played an atheist medical doctor alongside Audrey Hepburn's nun in The Nun's Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959). It is the melancholy tale of a young missionary working as a nurse in the Belgian Congo during WW II. The film was based on the novel by Kathryn Hulme that told the story of the real-life nun, Marie-Louise Habets. Especially this film, a huge financial and critical success, boosted Finch's international reputation.
West-German postcard by Ufa/Film-Foto, Berlin-Tempelhof, no. FK 3548 Photo: J. Arthur Rank Organisation. Peter Finch in The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1956).
Dutch postcard. Photo: Rank. Eva Bartok and Peter Finch in Amsterdam during the shooting of the British war-time diamond thriller Operation Amsterdam (Michael McCarthy, 1959). The film was produced by Maurice Cowan and Rank and distributed by Rank and 20th Century Fox.
A sought-after character actor in international cinema
In the course of the 1960s, Peter Finch succeeded in positioning himself increasingly as a sought-after character actor in international cinema. At the 1961 Berlinale, he was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his portrayal of a politician in crisis, both personally and professionally, in No Love for Johnnie by Ralph Thomas.
He also received much praise for his portrayal of Oscar Wilde in The Man with the Green Carnation/The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Ken Hughes, 1960) on the libel and subsequent criminal cases involving Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry. Finch won another BAFTA for his role and the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best English-Language Foreign Film, but the film was not popular at the box-offices.
Internationally, Finch played British officer Harris in Robert Aldrich's survival drama The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and Italian general Umberto Nobile in the expensive Soviet/Italian adventure film Krasnaya palatka/The Red Tent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1969) based on the story of the 1928 mission to rescue Umberto Nobile and the other survivors of the crash of the airship Italia. It features Sean Connery as Roald Amundsen. Finch also appeared in military roles in other films.
In 1960, Finch tried his hand behind the camera for once when he made the semi-documentary style short film The Day about the life of a boy on the island of Ibiza. The Day was well received at film festivals, but it was to remain his only directorial effort.
In Britain at this time, Peter Finch was one of a group of already established actors who had no inhibitions about working with the innovative directors of the British New Wave. He often played intelligent and reserved characters here, for example, a writer in a love affair with a younger woman in Desmond Davis' Girl with Green Eyes (1964) and the lonely farmer William Boldwood opposite Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's romantic drama Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) based on Thomas Hardy's novel 'On the Green Edge of the World'.
Italian postcard by Bromofoto, Milano, no. 1143 Photo: Rank. Peter Finch in Simon and Laura (Muriel Box, 1955).
Belgian postcard, no. 5457.
The first film star to be seen in a gay film kiss
In 1971 Peter Finch worked with Schlesinger again for the film drama Sunday, Bloody Sunday (John Schlesinger, 1971), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, in the category of Best Actor in a Leading Role. Finch inherited the role of a gay doctor who shares his younger lover (Murray Head) with a woman (Glenda Jackson) from Alan Bates, who wanted to do it but couldn't due to his being held up filming The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971). His replacement, Ian Bannen was fired at the beginning of the shooting due to his stated concern that portraying a homosexual engaged in the first screen kiss between two men might damage or destroy his career. Finch spontaneously replaced Bannen and unhesitatingly threw himself into the role. He kissed co-star Murray Head and received an Oscar nomination for his performance. For playing the role brilliantly, Finch won the BAFTA and National Society of Film Critics Awards prizes for Best Actor but lost the Oscar to eventual winner Gene Hackman.
Finch's subsequent film projects were less successful, however, as were his two films with Liv Ullmann: the spectacularly flopped musical Lost Horizon (Charles Jarrott, 1973) and the historical film The Abdication (Anthony Harvey, 1974). In the historical war film Bequest to the Nation (James Cellan Jones, 1973), he portrayed British General Horatio Nelson.
Shortly before his death, Peter Finch hit the screens with a television film, Raid on Entebbe (Irvin Kershner, 1976), in which he played Yitzchak Rabin, and was on a promotional tour for his latest feature film, the media satire Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976). In 1977, Finch died of a heart attack suffered in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angles at the age of 60. Only one day before, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on U.S. network television NBC, entertaining the host and the audience with tales of his youth, his 'psychic' grandmother and, eerily, a joke about dying from a heart attack.
A few months later, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Howard Beale, a television host gone mad, in Network. The award was accepted by his widow Eletha Finch. Finch and Heath Ledger are the only actors to date to receive the Oscar posthumously. The scenes in which Finch's character preaches his wisdom to the television audience are among the most famous of the classic Network. The film quote "I'm mad as hell and I can't take it anymore" spoken by him became equally famous.
Peter Finch was married three times and had four children. From 1943 until their divorce in 1959, he was married to ballet dancer Tamara Tchinarova Finch (1919-2017) They had one child. From 1959 to 1965, his wife was actress Yolande Turner (1935-2003), and they had two children. Businessman and film producer Charles Finch (b. 1962) is their son. From 1973 until his death in 1977 Peter Finch was married to Eletha Barrett Finch, with whom he had one child. Biographies and obituaries described Finch the man as a womaniser and relatively heavy drinker, but also as kind and educated. Peter Finch is buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Spanish postcard, no. 2660.
Sources: David Claydon (IMDb), Wikipedia (German, Dutch and English), and IMDb.
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