There is a tacit understanding in the film business that if the Oscars deign to show you love, you too must show love to the Oscars.

Albert Finney had little time for that. “I’ve been nominated five times, I think, and I’ve never been,” he told an interviewer in 2003. “I was in London. It’s a long way to go for a very long party, sitting there for six hours not having a cigarette or drink. It’s a waste of time.”

That casual “I think” is a mini-masterstroke of shade, but Finney got his tally on the nose. He was indeed nominated five times between 1964 and 2001 – yet never won for a series of roles that brilliantly deployed the signature blue-collar vigour and strut that had previously been so alien to the British leading man sphere.

There were the blockbusting star turns in the bawdy, rascally Tom Jones in 1963, and Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, in which he played an uncommonly curmudgeonly Hercule Poirot. Then came the finely scalpelled comic character study of The Dresser in 1983, and the fractured, boozy psychodrama of Under the Volcano in 1984. Finally there was the rock-solid supporting part: as the brusque lawyer whose job it was to let Julia Roberts shine in Erin Brockovich in 2001. It was that last type – the one that had Finney bristling away in a film’s margins, rather than spotlit at its heart – that a new generation of cinema-goers came to know him for.