—Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom: Letters from Home (2000)
In the early 1960s
, the groundbreaking films of the British New Wave introduced four young actors who seemed destined for an important place in cinema history. Richard Harris (1930-2002) had been acting in films and television for several years before his breakout performance in This Sporting Life (1963) as a Yorkshire coal miner who becomes an overnight rugby superstar, a performance that earned him not only an Oscar nomination but the best actor award at Cannes. But after this auspicious role in one of the seminal films of the British New Wave, his career veered all over the place—from the lead in Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) to King Arthur in the big-budget musical flop Camelot (1967) to an unlikely leading man for Doris Day in one of her last movies, Caprice (1967), and even several pop music albums—before fizzling away to leads in mostly forgettable films and then supporting character roles in better films like Unforgiven (1992).
Alan Bates (1934-2003) had better luck with his career. After becoming familiar to American audiences playing opposite Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek (1964) and a couple of years later opposite Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (1966), he enjoyed a strong career for more than twenty-five years, dividing his time between the stage (in 1972 he won a Tony for Butley, which he later filmed as part of the American Film Theatre series—costarring Jessica Tandy, directed by Harold Pinter and highly recommended) and American and especially British films, giving consistently fine performances for some of the best directors of the time, such as John Schlesinger, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, and Robert Altman.
After his breakout performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), Albert Finney (b. 1936) became a huge star in the Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963). Today he continues to be one of our greatest film actors, the recipient of five Oscar nominations and certainly the most successful, not to mention the most versatile, of his generation of British New Wave actors. Appearing as a romantic leading man opposite Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road (1967), in heavy disguise playing Hercule Poirot while still in his thirties in Murder on the Orient Express (1976), in heavy disguise again as a senile elderly actor in The Dresser (1983), as a self-destructive alcoholic British expat living in Mexico in John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984), as a Prohibition-era Irish-American gangster for the Coens in Miller's Crossing (1990), as Julia Roberts's bemused boss in Erin Brockovich (2000)—nothing seems beyond his reach.
The fourth of these young men, Tom Courtenay, has had the most perplexing career of all. As gifted an actor as Bates and Finney, he saw his career soar in films of the early and mid-sixties before settling into a leisurely pattern of sporadic success largely in stage and television roles. Unlike the clearly ambitious (but also temperamental and alcoholic) Richard Harris, though, Courtenay's relatively obscure later movie career seems to have been by choice. "I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me," he said in a 1995 magazine interview. "I didn't like the parts I had and I just longed to work in the theatre, and so that's what I did."