It was 1977 and Denis King, who’d met Albert Finney in 1960 after seeing him on stage in Keith Waterhouse’s play Billy Liar, was bemused when one of Britain’s best-known and most famous actors told him: “I think I’d like to make a record.”

“Why?” he asked Finney. “You don’t sing.”

“Yes, I do,” replied the 40-something star.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” replied King, who knew the music industry inside out, firmly. In the Fifties and Sixties, he’d been part of a successful pop group called the King Brothers – perhaps the first British ‘boy band’ – and he’d gone on as a solo artist to write the themes for popular television series such as The Adventures of Black Beauty, Two’s Company, Lovejoy and Hannay. As with Richard Burton, it had been one of Finney's teachers who'd encouraged him to take up acting – the idea had never occurred to him and his talent had come as a surprise – and he'd gone to have great successes on stage in legendary productions of Coriolanus and Luther and films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Murder on the Orient Express, Erin Brockovich and his haunting swansong in Skyfall.

But Finney was at heart always a lad from Salford and lads from Salford, certainly when he was growing up, dreamt not of becoming actors, but playing for Manchester United or becoming pop stars surrounded by adoring female fans. King understood Finney and had felt an immediate rapport with him over their shared sense of humour and straightforward, down-to-earth way of looking at the world. They had been brought up in pretty much the same neck of the woods, too. King could see clearly enough his friend was always going to be that Salford lad – with that lad’s hopes and dreams – and Finney, for his part, was wondering in middle age if there wasn't more to him than acting. He’d made a success of appearing on stage and film almost overnight and maybe it’s understandable he might have thought he had another so far untapped talent inside him.

King was too wily to reject the idea out of hand. He’d thought immediately of the success Richard Harris, another actor with no previous aptitude for singing, had had with MacArthur Park – Jimmy Webb’s gloriously silly song about a cake being left out in the rain that got to be No 4 in the UK singles chart – and thought there could be money in it.

Finney had as it happened done a small amount of singing in a show he’d done for director Lindsay Anderson called The Lily White Boys at the Royal Court in London, but he was very much an actor who was occasionally required to sing rather than the other way round.

The same bug had, however, bitten actors, before and since. Dracula star Christopher Lee, long regarding himself a frustrated singer, had recorded some opera, in addition, improbably, to some heavy metal. Lee Marvin even managed to make it to number one in the UK hit parade with his rendition of Wand’rin’ Star from his film Paint Your Wagon, even if his co-star Jean Seberg considered his voice to resemble “rain gurgling down a rusty pipe”.

After the conversation with Finney, King ran the idea by David Platz, a major mover and shaker in the pop music world who suggested he get his putative songbird into a recording studio and see what kind of sound he made.

“Of course that meant we needed some lyrics and some music, and, rather than drawing on any existing work, Albert took it upon himself to go off and write some lyrics which surprisingly enough weren’t altogether bad,” King recalled.

“Pretty mournful stuff mostly about the women in his life and I gave it a musical accompaniment. I said doing a demo could be pretty expensive as we could end up with a 35-piece orchestra, plus renting the studio and getting all the technicians we needed, but he was unsettlingly relaxed about it all. He told me not to worry about the money. ‘Just do it,’ he kept saying.”

Finney stumped up the cash and King secured an orchestra for a recording session near Wembley Stadium in north London.

“I wouldn’t say it was a disaster but I wouldn’t say any of us that day felt a new musical star had been born,” he admitted. “Our demo recording ended up in a box marked ‘Albert Finney’ on a shelf in my office.

“Albert kept asking me if we’d got a deal and I had to keep telling him to hang on, and then, one day, the European head of Motown Records walked into my office. He chanced to see the box as he was leaving and asked about it. I told him about Albert‘s ambitions and of course he knew all about him as a film star, and, quite casually, he said he would be willing to throw an initial $250,000 at making it a success, which was a fortune in those days.”

Even Finney was taken aback by the offer. Quite apart from the enormous sum of money involved, Motown specialised very much in black artists, such as Stevie Wonder and the Supremes. This was an unlikely venture for them – and him!

“He was still of course keen and I put them in touch and the next thing I knew Albert was asking me if I’d like to come on a five-week tour of the States with him and his then girlfriend, actress Diana Quick,” King continued,

Motown had recorded and released an album, called Albert Finney’s Album.

“There was, of course, no real reason for me to go, but I was in an unhappy marriage at the time, and, thinking it might be an escape, I happily agreed.

“Albert did all the big chat shows such as Johnny Carson’s and Merv Griffin’s and I’d be expected to play the piano and we stayed at all the best hotels. We got to have an audience, too, with Barney Ales, who was the boss of Motown Records, and I remember him turning to me, and, noticing I hadn’t a woman in tow, asked me bluntly if I had got laid yet.

“Well, good English Catholic boy that I am, I just replied politely not yet, and the next thing I knew he’d fixed me up with an incredibly beautiful young woman. It was that kind of a trip.”

All the while Finney’s album was sitting in large piles in record shops all over the world. Those who bought it heard a voice that was mellow and reflective and talked to a generation that hadn’t quite let go of their past.

“They’ve pulled the terraced houses down, And put the people in the sky, In towers 20 storeys high…” Of women, the middle-aged pop star warbled: “You have to handle with great care, The bird of paradise. The way she moves. To see how gracefully her limbs unfold.”

The reviews were mixed. Judith Simmons in the Daily Express felt Finney had a “wonderfully poetic, declamatory style”. While the men were not so kind. Barry Coleman in the Guardian felt Finney “should have known better”.

For all the lustre of the Finney name, the album managed only to make it to 192 of the top 200. King admits frankly that the album was a financial disaster, losing Motown every dollar they had invested, but, then again, as he pointed out, they were doing so well at the time, they scarcely noticed.

“Albert sort of let go of his pop star dream after that. He’d tried it and it hadn’t worked out, and, so far as he was concerned, he’d got it out of his system,” King recalled. “Looking back, I think maybe the professionals around him, including me, should have been more assertive, but it’s difficult to tell a man like Albert what to do… but it’s hard to argue with someone who has got it into their head they are going to be great.”

Finney, who died aged 82 in February 2019, never talked about his singing career after that, apparently accepting his genius was limited to acting.

If he'd got to celebrate his 90th birthday this weekend, there’s little doubt he’d have looked back on his life with few, if any, regrets and accepted he’d been a very lucky man. He'd made it clear to Laurence Olivier he'd had no interest in succeeding him as the boss of the National Theatre – the most prestigious job his profession could offer – and turned down a knighthood.

He got to make some great friends, entertained a great many theatre and film goers, made a lot of money and had a lot of fun. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

• Tim Walker is a journalist, biographer and award-winning playwright