Sun-Herald (Sydney, NSW : 1953 - 1954), Sunday 15 August 1954, page 23


The LONG ROAD

TO LONDON The

Success Story

Of Peter Finch

PART 2

I By GEORGE H. JOHNSTON

PETER FINCH, the boy Buddhist in India, the young swagman in the Australian outback, the happygo-lucky, rather feckless player in Sydney radio serials and third-rate vaudeville, gave few outward signs of ever becoming the brilliant, highly-paid stage and screen actor He is to-day.

But he had begun to learn, in a gay, tough, amusing, sometimes hardworking apprenticeship to fame.

The year now is 1936, and he is 20 . . .

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THE first person who A ever gave Peter Finch any tuition in acting the first person who ever shocked him with the realisation that there was a different and serious side to the theatre, was a rangy American comedian named Bobby Capron.

And he was the first person who ever showed him life's darker facet of personal tragedy, for Cap-ron was drowned before Finch's eyes on a Sunday picnic on the bank of the River Yarra, at Warrandyte.

They had been playing together in the comedy "So This is Hollywood." They had become great friends. "Peter," Capron would say to him, one day you can become a good actor, maybe a great actor, but, boy, you've got work ahead!" And with his whisky glass in hand, Capron would move around his hotel room, explaining to the "juvenile" how you walked across a stage, how you picked up a telephone, Ijow you read a newspaper. And then came the day of the picnic . The

Yarra was in flood. Suddenly Capron looked down and saw his pet dog in the water, desperately struggling to get to the bank. The American jumped in, grabbed the dog, and the two of them were immediately swept away on the yellow current. Finch raced to the bank, but the man and dog, to everyone's horror, were swirled into a flooded mining

tunnel.

Finch scrambled to the outlet of the tunnel and dived into a mad whirlpool of churning floodwaters and interlocked branches. Almost drowning himself, he saved the dog, but Capron was

dead.

Peter Finch was later to receive a scroll of commendation from the Royal Humane Society and a letter of thanks from the United States Embassy; but he had lost his first winter in the Thespian art.

He returned to Sydney and to radio acting, but Carron's death had subtly changed him. The man whom London drama critics would later describe ecstatically as "the greatest Mercritic of a generation, perhaps of this century was still little more than a brush amateur, but there was always now to be a more serious undertone, a purpose, to his work. He would then have laughed - and still would-at the use of the word "dedication."

In Sydney he was offered a job by one of the fabulous characters of the Aus

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tralian entertainment world, George Sorlie, "the King of the Road," whose six-bill tent shows were known all over inland Australia.

Sorlie was a veteran who had made a fortune touring with "Uncle Tom's Cabin in which he played an unforgettable Uncle Tom, and "East Lynne." The tent shows of his New English Comedy Company (which was neither new nor English packed 1,100 people into its great circus bigtops, playing vaudeville and what in the profession is known as a "straight sixbill six different plays on a one-week stand, with a change of play every night, the toughest and most invaluable training for a young actor. They were plays like "While Parents Sleep," 'Ten Minute Alibi," "Rookery Nook," "Tons of Money."