Airdate: Mad as Hell: Peter Finch

No it’s not Shaun Micallef, but SBS TWO doco Mad as Hell: Peter Finch takes a look at the life of the Australian actor whose role in Network made famous the line, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

While Mad as Hell: Peter Finch re-traces the life and career of British-born Australian actor Peter Finch, it is much more than a biopic of one of the great actors of the 20th century. The program also provides a fascinating insight into the man behind the various acting roles as told by his three daughters, friends, fellow actors, and producers and directors who worked with him.

Peter Finch is the only actor ever to have received an Academy Award for Best Actor posthumously for his performance in the film Network (1976) where Finch, as apocalyptic newsreader Howard Beale, tells a stunned American public to go outside and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Professionally Peter Finch worked with some of the major stars and directors working in England and Hollywood, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Errol Flynn, Virginia McKenna, Glenda Jackson, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Christie, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Angela Lansbury, Faye Dunaway and William Holden.

This film also provides an opportunity to explore, through Finch’s early career and the Old Vic tour by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1948, the complex relationship between Britain and her Australian colony during the 1940s and 1950s.

Sunday, 30 September at 8.30pm on SBS TWO