Finney's first film was 1960's The Entertainer in which he shared screen time with the great Laurence Olivier; he quickly followed up with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a "kitchen sink", in which his memorable performance as a hostile young factory worker provided the definitive portrait of a British working-class.
The actor was set to take on the starring role in David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia, but quit, because he did not want to be tied to a long-term film contract, involving such a gruelling shooting schedule. Instead, he went on to play the title role in Tony Richardson's bawdy adaptation of Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones (1963) Finney found another wildly popular character, and the film made him an international star overnight.
In 1965, with actor Michael Medwin, he founded Memorial Enterprises Productions, which was responsible for several outstanding features including his own directorial debut, Charlie Bubbles (1968), and Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973).
Favouring interesting character parts, Finney has appeared as a musical Scrooge in 1970, followed by a Oscar-nominated turn as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Daddy Warbucks in Annie (1982) and an actor-manager in The Dresser (1983).
He played a drunk in Orphans a charismatic Irish gang leader in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990); a constable in a small Northern Irish border town in The Playboys (1992); a sexually repressed Irish bus conductor in A Man of No Importance (1994); an Irish constable unable to express his emotions in The Run of the Country (1995) and a US attorney in the Steven Soderbergh directed Erin Brokovich (2000).
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