English actor John Finch was born on March 2, 1941, to a banker in Caterham, Surrey. In school he participated in amateur performances, later acted as a folk singer. As a young man, he was preparing to enter the London School of Economics, but when he was eighteen years old, Finch suddenly changed his mind and joined the Air Force, where he was assigned to the Parachute Regiment. Upon his return from the army, he worked as an assistant director in theaters in Croydon and Chesterfield, and by the
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English actor John Finch was born on March 2, 1941, to a banker in Caterham, Surrey. In school he participated in amateur performances, later acted as a folk singer. As a young man, he was preparing to enter the London School of Economics, but when he was eighteen years old, Finch suddenly changed his mind and joined the Air Force, where he was assigned to the Parachute Regiment. Upon his return from the army, he worked as an assistant director in theaters in Croydon and Chesterfield, and by the time of his first television appearance in 1967, he had appeared in more than fifty plays. He began his film career in 1970, starring in two Hammer Films horror films at once - Vampires Lovers (Directed by Roy Ward Baker) and The Frankenstein Horror (Directed by Jimmy Sangster). However, unlike other performers of this genre, Finch soon showed himself as a serious dramatic actor, appearing in the title role in the controversial and very harsh version of Shakespeare's Macbeth by Roman Polansky (1971). His next achievement was Alfred Hitchcock's crime thriller The Excitement (1972), in which he played an unemployed man wanted by police on false charges of murdering his ex-wife. At the same time, “Lady Carolina Lamb” was released – a richly costumed romantic drama from the life of English aristocratic society, staged by screenwriter Robert Bolt. This time Finch played surrounded by the best British actors of the time, such as Richard Chamberlain, John Mills, Sarah Miles, Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. This film was followed by the science fiction film The Last Program (1973, directed by Robert Fast) scripted by the famous science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, with Finch as the brilliant scientist Jerry Cornelius, trying to save the program of creating an ideal, self-replicating person from attackers. Subsequently, the actor starred in several films by Spanish and French directors, including Roger Vadim in the film Faithful Wife (1976), several British television productions based on the works of William Shakespeare and the English director John Gillermin in the adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel Death on the Nile (1978).
Despite a brilliant start in the early seventies, he failed to consolidate his initial success, and in the next decade his career began to decline. Since the early eighties, Finch is mostly known as an actor, starring in character roles in horror films and mystical thrillers. Finch never became a star of the first magnitude (which, according to his own statement, he never aspired to), but nevertheless, his spectacular appearance of a gloomy, brooding gentleman and undoubted acting talent continue to attract the attention of viewers. Among the most famous films in which he starred in recent years are “The Hidden Fear” (1994, directed by C. Courtney Joyner), “The Obscurantist” (1997, directed by Julian Richards) and “Anazapta” (2001, directed by Alberto Schiama).