| Biography | Finlay Jefferson Currie (20 January 1878 9 May 1968) was a Scottish actor of stage, screen, and television.
Currie was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1878. His acting career began on the stage. He and his wife, Maude Courtney (18841959), did a song and dance act in the US in the 1890s. He made his first film (The Old Man) in 1931. He appeared as a priest in the 1943 Ealing World War II movie Undercover. His most famous film role was as the convict Abel Magwitch in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). He later began to appear in Hollywood film epics, including the 1951 Quo Vadis (as Saint Peter), the multi-Oscar winning 1959 Ben-Hur, as Balthazar, one of the Three Magi, and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) as an aged, wise senator.
He appeared in People Will Talk with Cary Grant; and he also portrayed Robert Taylor's embittered father in MGM's Technicolor 1952 version of Ivanhoe. In 1962, he starred in an episode of The DuPont Show of the Week (NBC) entitled The Ordeal of Dr. Shannon, an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's novel, Shannon's Way. Currie's last role was as Mr. Lundie, the minister, in the 1966 television adaptation of the musical Brigadoon. In one of his very last performances, Currie plays a dying mafioso boss in the two part "Vendetta for the Saint" (1968) starring Roger Moore.
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in February 1963 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre in London. Later in life he became a much respected antiques dealer, specialising in coins and precious metals. He had been a longtime collector of the works of Robert Burns. |