Actor Peter Finch dies, hailed as 'Network' star

LOS ANGELES (AP)Actor Peter Finch, who often played dissolute aristocrats and capped a brilliant career portraying a deranged anchorman in the movie, "Network," died yesterday. He was 60.

Finch's publicist, Neil Koenigsberg, said the actor collapsed at the Beverly Hills Hotel yesterday morning as he waited for, a breakfast meeting with "Network" director Sidney Lumet.

The announcement was delayed more than two hours while, authorities tried to notify the actor's wife, Eletha, who had left the couple's Bel Air home to take their daughter to school:

"When I walked into the lobby about 9 o'clock," said Lumet, "I saw Peter start to leave and then fall over. He opened his eyes once and I think he saw me, but then he went out."

Finch had appeared on NBC's "Tonight Show" Thursday night.

Finch was stricken at the peak of a long and distinguished career, Critics had hailed his portrayal of the mad newscaster Howard Beale in "Network" and a posthumous Academy Award nomination for best actor seems certain.

His most recent role was in the NBC version of the Israeli commando

rescue of airline hostages, "Raid on Entebbe." Finch had recently moved: his family to Los Angeles.

He had been in films almost 40 years, starting in Australia in 1938. He was born in London Sept. 28, 1916, of Australian parents, his father a physicist and member of the LeighMallory expedition to Mt. Everest in 1922.

His parents separated when the boy was 2 and he lived for eight years with a grandmother near Versailles.

The grandmother took the boy to India where she apprenticed him to a Buddhist priest, but British authorities intervened and he was sent to Australia to be reared by relatives. He worked briefly as a reporter on the Sydney Sun, bummed around Australia before drifting into the theater.

"I had a restless nature and found it hard to settle down," he once said. "I became an actor for economic reasons; that was during the great Depression, I saw an ad for a straight man to work with a comedian, answered it and got the job. I did it to eat."

In World War II he served with the Australian army in the Middle East and returned to organize an enter-

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tainment troupe, "Finch's Follies,” tõ tour army camps.

"Finch's Follies" led to a peacetime troupe of strolling players, and he was seen by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in a glass factory. They urged him to try for a career in England, and he went there in 1948. He found work immediately with Dame Edith Evans in a play, "Daphne Laureola."

His first British film was "Train of Events" for Sir Michael Balcon in 1949. Walt Disney cast him as the Sheriff of Nottingham in "Robin, Hood" and a flood of films followed.

He played opposite Elizabeth. Taylor in "Elephant Walk," Audrey Hepburn in "A Nun's Story," Sophia Loren in "Judith" and Kim Novak in "The Legend of Lylah Clare." He starred in "The Trials of Oscar. Wilde," "The Pumpkin Eater," "Flight of the Phoenix" and "Far from the Madding Crowd."

Despite such prominent films he failed to achieve international attention until his role as the homosexual doctor in "Sunday Bloody Sunday." It won him an Academy nomination as best actor.

Finch had been married four times. He is survived by a daughter, 9, by his current wife, and three other grown children who live in Europe.

Actor Peter Finch, left, is shown during his appearance Thursday night on the "Tonight Show" with host Johnny Carson.