His “mad as hell” outburst as American newsreader Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network was one of the defining moments of Peter Finch’s acting career, for which he won a posthumous Oscar. The fury Finch displayed sprang from the hypocrisy of attacks on his personal life, according to the author of a new work about the snobbery and prejudice that dogged the hell-raising star’s third marriage, to a young Jamaican woman.
Finch, one of the most admired stars of his era, had to defend his relationship with Eletha Barrett from the outset – and not just from racists. The Jamaican class system was also set against their union.
“People on the island said Finch should be ashamed [of Barrett’s lowly roots] and should leave her. But he spent time with ordinary Jamaicans,” said playwright Cassie McFarlane. “When I researched the story, which I had been told as a child and is still well-known, I found it made people uncomfortable.”
In her play Mad As Hell, which opens on Wednesday at the Jermyn Street theatre in London’s West End, the Jamaican writer reveals criticism of Barrett that persists to this day and explains the background to the Australian actor’s career-defining performance as Beale – a role now being reprised to great acclaim at the National Theatre by Bryan Cranston in a stage adaption of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay.
“When I was a little girl I heard about this scandalous woman,” remembers McFarlane. “My aunt told me she was in the Pegasus hotel having drinks at a society event when this young woman in a nice dress, with a beehive wig and carrying a handbag, came on to the terrace. Then she dropped the bag, took off her wig and her clothes until she was just wearing a bikini. Next she jumped in the pool to swim, before she put it all back on again and walked out. That was her. That was Eletha Barrett, the wild child.”
Barrett and Finch met in a bar in the Jamaican countryside when the star had escaped Hollywood for the Caribbean. “Eletha worked as a hostess in the seaside area. But this really did mean she would dance for the patrons, encouraging them to buy drinks. She didn’t do anything more than dance,” said McFarlane.
The couple were together for 12 years and married for five, despite a 30-year age gap that would raise eyebrows today.
In the 1970s, though, it was class that caused the problem. “Jamaica was very stratified and many felt she was from the wrong class and had not been to the right schools or university,” said McFarlane.
Finch had originally been brought over to Britain from Australia to act in London by Laurence Olivier in 1948 and he won his first Bafta in 1956 for A Town Like Alice. Accolades also came his way for The Trials of Oscar Wilde and Sunday Bloody Sunday.
After a Hollywood career, he became the first actor to win an Oscar posthumously for Network. (In the following 36 years, only Heath Ledger has done the same.) He died from a heart attack in 1977 in the lobby of the Beverly Hills hotel. Network director Sidney Lumet tried unsuccessfully to revive him. The film was nominated for 10 Academy awards, and won four, including for Chayefsky’s screenplay.
Finch’s award was presented to Barrett, by then the mother of their nine-year-old daughter Diana, who McFarlane says is “supportive” of her theatrical version of her parents’ story. “If Finch was going to marry a Jamaican, they felt, it should be someone from an established family.”
