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Final cut: Unforgettable screen swansongs
Peter Finch – ‘Network’ (1976)
Peter Finch was an actor who took immense risks during his versatile career, memorably putting his leading man status on the line to play a homosexual doctor in 1971’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. Just five years later he starred as a deranged news anchor who begins to crack on live TV but he didn't live to pick up his slew of awards.
The studio capitalises on the ratings-boosting “mad phophet of the airwaves”, extorting his sanity for their bank balances. ‘Network’ was way ahead of its time and so was Finch’s brilliant central performance, which at the time became the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar – the second was Heath Ledger for ‘The Dark Knight’.
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