Albert Finney

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Date of Birth : May 9th 1936

Finney’s first film was The Entertainer (1960), but his breakthrough came with his portrayal of a hedonistic, disillusioned factory worker in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This led to a series of “angry young man” roles in kitchen sink dramas, before he starred in the Academy Award winning 1963 film Tom Jones, for which he turned down the role of T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia.

He also played the leading role in the television series My Uncle Silas, about a Cornish country gentleman looking after his great-nephew. The series ran from 2000 until 2002, then again for a mini-series in 2003.

He has been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984). He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000). London based S&M Cafes has launched a petition aiming to honour Albert Finney , the veteran British actor who was 71 in May 2007. The petition will be submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in Summer 2007 requesting that Finney is considered for a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. Despite his commercial and critical success on the big screen he has never won an Oscar.

Finney received a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles in 1961 for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). He was also nominated for Best British Actor for the same film. Despite being nominated 15 more times, he finally won for The Gathering Storm. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his performance in the HBO telefilm The Image (1990), and won an Emmy, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Mini-Series or TV Film, for his performance as Winston Churchill in HBO’s The Gathering Storm in 2002.