The son of an Australian farmer, Finch went to Sydney at the age of ten and spent his youth in Australia. Among a variety of jobs he made one film there, Mr. Chedworth Steps Out (38, Ken G. Hall), before war service. After that he was acting in the Australian theatre and cinema - Rats of Tobruk (44, Charles Chaurel) and Eureka Stockade (47, Harry Watt) - before Laurence Olivier, on tour, recommended that he go to England, and in time Finch had a melodramatic affair with Vivien Leigh. He appeared on the London stage (Iago once to Welles's Othello), but soon settled for films, at first in small parts, then with a mixture of heavies and romantic leads, with an early involvement in American films: Train of Events (49, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden); The Miniver Story (50, H. C. Potter); The Wooden Horse (50, Jack Lee); The Story of Robin Hood (52, Ken Annakin); The Heart of the Matter (53, George More O'Ferrall); The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (54, Sidney Gilliat); Elephant Walk (54, William Dieterle); Father Brown (54, Robert Hamer); Make Me an Offer (54, Cyril Frankel); Dark Avenger (55, Henry Levin); Josephine and Men (55, Roy Boulting); Passage Home (55, Roy Boulting); and Simon and Laura (55, Muriel Box).

He was nearly 40 now, and with a breath of accent and a face weathered by sun he was more masculine than most men in the British cinema. As his parts improved, so he showed himself increasingly subtle and capable. Unlike many other British actors, he seemed to leave reserves untapped that implied a full character of which we were seeing only a part. In essence it comes from the ability to discover a part of yourself in whatever character you are playing. Because no effort seems to have been made, the effect of authority is all the more compelling: The Battle of the River Plate (56, Michael Powell); as an Australian soldier in A Town Like Alice (56, Lee); Robbery Under Arms (57, Lee); Windom's World (58, Ronald Neame); The Nun's Story (59, Fred Zinnemann); Operation Amsterdam (59, Michael McCarthy); stylish and touching in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (60, Ken Hughes); Kidnapped (60, Robert Stevenson); Rachel Cade (60, Gordon Douglas); No Love for Johnnie (61, Ralph Thomas); I Thank a Fool (62, Robert Stevens); In the Cool of the Day (63, Stevens); The Girl With Green Eyes (64, Desmond Davis); as the husband in The Pumpkin Eater (64, Jack Clayton); Judith (65, Daniel Mann); The Flight of the Phoenix (65, Robert Aldrich); 10:30 P.M. Summer (66, Jules Dassin); Far From the Madding Crowd (67, John Schlesinger); as the von Sternberg figure in The Legend of Lylah Clare (68, Aldrich); The Red Tent (71, Mikhail Kalatazov); as the only truly believable character, the homosexual doctor, in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (71, Schlesinger); Something to Hide (71, Alastair Reid); as Nelson in Bequest to the Nation (72, James Cellan Jones); England Made Me (72, Peter Duffell); bearing up manfully in the Ronald Colman part in the musical Lost Horizon (72, Charles Jarrott); and The Abdication (74, Anthony Harvey).

He played Yitzhak Rabin in Raid on Entebbe (76, Irvin Kershner). But he will be treasured for his last part, as Howard Beale in Network (76, Sidney Lumet), because it won him the best actor Oscar, posthumously, and because it seemed, with hindsight, a prediction of his own dropping dead. Beale is less a role than a balloon inflated by Chayefsky's sermon, but Finch gave the ranting warnings a bloodshot desperation, and he made one line famous:

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."