(Credit: HBO)
Sun 17 August 2025 1:30, UK
For the longest time, it felt as if Brian Cox was a well-kept secret. The boisterous Scot was quietly one of the greatest actors of his generation, giving knockout performances on the stage, on TV, and in underseen cinematic gems.
Unfortunately, he was never going to stay hidden for long. As soon as he burst on screen as Logan Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, the sweary cat was out of the bag. Brian was big news.
He might despise his newfound fame, but it’s been an incredibly long time coming. Cox had been plugging away since the early 1960s, putting his classical training to good use in a number of acclaimed productions. A founding member of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in Edinburgh and a former player in the Royal Shakespeare Company, he honed his craft over several years before first appearing on TV in 1968. It was in a televised play called The Year of the Sex Olympics, which… yeah, I got nothing.
Though Cox wouldn’t make his feature film debut until 1971, playing Leon Trotsky in the historical epic Nicholas and Alexandra, he had been inspired to follow his acting dreams by a movie that had been released over a decade earlier. He worried that his working class background would lock him out of the top roles, until one classic British drama proved him wrong.
“I saw Albert Finney in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and I was just gobsmacked,” he told the BBC Radio 4 programme This Cultural Life. “I couldn’t believe it. Greatly, he became a friend. He is probably the reason I felt I could become an actor, seeing Albert on screen. That raw energy and all of that working class environment he brought to the screen. It was astonishing to me.”
Released in 1960, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is an adaptation of the Alan Sillitoe novel of the same name. The author himself wrote the screenplay, while Karel Reisz of The French Lieutenant’s Woman handled directing duties. Finney plays Arthur Seaton, a young man who lives for nothing more than drinking booze and sleeping with women. His relationships with young, single Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) and older, married Brenda (Rachel Roberts) form the backbone of this quintessential ‘kitchen sink’ drama. It’s had a lasting impact on British culture, including supplying the Arctic Monkeys with the name of their debut album.
He doesn’t get nearly the credit he’s owed, but Albert Finney was a superb performer. Whether as the titular miser in Scrooge, a closeted gay bus driver in A Man of No Importance, or a man on his deathbed in Big Fish, he filled every role with life and always made you believe that what he was doing was genuine. Cox had the honour of working with his idol on the made-for-TV drama Pope John Paul II. Finney played the namesake pontiff, while Cox played a figure named Father Góra.
Finney passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. He might no longer be with us, but his legacy lives on not only through his incredible body of work, but through the friends and fans he inspired. Next time you’re laughing your ass off at a Logan Roy rant, say a silent ‘thank you’ to Albert Finney.
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