British actor and international star by the ’60s. His 35 films include “Elephant Walk,” 1954, “The Pumpkin Eater,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Lost Horizon.”
Finch was the son of Professor George Ingle-Finch, a well-known English physicist as well as mountaineer. He was a member of the Leigh-Mallory Everest expedition in 1922. Peter’s parents were divorced when he was two and he did not see them again for 25 years, living with his grandmother near Versailles, France. A theosophist, she took him to Madras, India when he was eight and placed him with a Buddhist priest. The British authorities removed him and placed him with his grandfather in Australia.
He left school at 14, working several odd jobs. In his teens, Finch got a job with a vaudeville group and toured Australia playing in English farces. In the Army toward the end of WW II, Finch put together a revue called “Finch’s Follies.” After the Army, he organized a repertory company playing to factories. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were in Australia in 1946 and came to see “The Chronic Invalid,” performed in a glassblowers’ factory. Olivier advised Finch to go to London, which he did the following year.
His first role was in a film, “Train of Events,” followed by several plays which brought him substantial theater and film parts. His first big screen role was Walt Disney’s “Story of Robin Hood” with Richard Todd in the lead role and Finch as the Sheriff of Nottingham. He made a great impact in 1958 as a doctor in the Belgian Congo in “The Nun’s Story” with Audrey Hepburn.
Finch married three times, twice to white women; his last wife was black. His first wife was a Russian ballerina with whom he had a daughter, Anita. His second marriage was to Yolande Turner, a South African with whom he had a second daughter, Samantha, and a son, Charles. His last marriage was to Eletha, a Jamaican hairdresser. A variety of steamy love affairs included most notably actress Vivien Leigh and singer Shirley Bassey. A world traveler, he loved walking tours in different parts of the world. He was unapologetic for his well-known fondness for the bottle.
Finch received the Best Actor Oscar posthumously for his role in “Network,” ten weeks after his death of a heart attack on 14 January 1977, Los Angeles, CA.
Link to Wikipedia biography