Product Overview
While Mad as Hell: Peter Finch maps the career of actor Peter Finch, this feature-length documentary is much more than a biopic of one of the great actors of the 20th century. Mad as Hell also provides a fascinating insight into the man behind his various acting personas, as examined through the eyes of 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 live newscaster 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, Liv Ullmann, Faye Dunaway and William Holden.
This film also provides an opportunity to explore through the lens of Finch's 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.
