Author Topic: Brutal childhood haunted Richard Griffiths, the star with a giant-sized talent  (Read 2081 times)

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
The greatest triumph of Richard Griffiths, who has died at 65, was over his own past
BY CHRISTOPHER STEVENS


Lecherous, irascible and eccentric, the unforgettable movie characters created by Richard Griffiths gave fathers, uncles and teachers a bad name.

But the worse he behaved — on film, on stage and in real life — the more we loved him for it.

Griffiths, aged 65, who died on Thursday following complications from heart surgery, turned every family man he played into a monster.

In the classic Eighties sitcom A Kind Of Living, he was a father who couldn’t even be bothered to give his baby son a name. At six months old, the child was just called ‘Og’.

As drunken sex pest Uncle Monty in Withnail And I, he chased his victim (a young Paul McGann) round a bedroom, growling: ‘I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!’

As sadistic bully Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter films, he forced the boy-wizard to live in a cupboard under the stairs.

While as avuncular grammar school master Hector in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, he inspired his sixth-formers to pass their Oxbridge entrance exams — but groped them as he gave them lifts home from school on the back of his moped.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
A baby girl, Mary, had been born but died in unexplained circumstances in hospital when a week old.

His mother claimed she had fallen asleep with the baby in her arms and had woken to find her lying on the floor with her skull crushed.

Griffiths’ father never believed his wife’s claim that a nurse must have taken the baby as she slept and dropped it.

Their grief became even more overpowering when, after Richard’s birth, two miscarriages and two more infant deaths followed.

It left his Catholic parents with a lasting dread of hospitals. ‘My mother turned into a haunted, frightened rabbit,’ he said. ‘She died early because she couldn’t bring herself to go to hospital when she was ill.’

His father was a steel-fitter, laying metal foundations for buildings. He drank heavily and could not always earn enough to feed his family.

To make ends meet, he fought all-comers in pubs for cash. The debts he ran up with moneylenders left his son with a determination never to borrow money. Throughout his life, Griffiths refused to use a credit card.

After running away from home several times and dropping out of school, his natural skill as a draughtsman won him a place at the local art college, but he dropped out. His father got him a job as a steelworker, but he snubbed that, too, to his father’s fury.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Instead, he trained as an actor at the Manchester Polytechnic school of drama, and was soon getting parts on radio, then a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company and his first film — which, sadly, his parents never lived to see.

Small parts in British classics, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Chariots Of Fire and Gandhi, followed, and he was nearly cast as the fifth Doctor Who, after Tom Baker, but lost out to Peter Davison.

However, it was the decadent, scabrous Withnail And I in 1987 that established him as a national treasure. He played the leering, scheming Uncle Monty. Foul-mouthed, lachrymose and dangerously fast-moving for such a big man, he stole every scene.

Monty was ‘one of the stately homos of England’, Griffiths joked, and the role put him in demand as a spokesperson and figurehead for gay causes. Yet in real life, he was happily married to an Irish actress called Heather Gibson.

He kept working on British TV, in sitcoms such as the Nineties crime series Pie In The Sky in which he played a detective who would rather be running a restaurant.

Writer Andy Merriman, who worked with him in radio on the Mr Finchley stories (about a middle-aged clerk on his first holiday), said: ‘He was the best actor I’ve ever worked with. The way he added tiny grace notes and reactions was brilliant.’

It was his role in 2001 as Harry Potter’s blustering, hen-pecked uncle Vernon Dursley that made him an international star — a fame he never entirely appreciated.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
He regarded autograph-hunters as selfish time-wasters and the notion of overnight success after a 35-year career as ridiculous.

Naturally, he enjoyed the privilege of rudeness that Uncle Vernon’s character allowed him. In a supermarket one evening he was approached by a man whose young son spotted him. Griffiths barked: ‘a) he should be in bed, b) I’m not here to entertain 11-year-olds and c) the films aren’t real!’

Father and son, of course, were delighted: it was just what everyone expected from fat, furious, out-of-breath Uncle Vernon.

Despite his massive girth, Griffiths was not a great eater. His weight was not the result of gluttony.

As a boy he was painfully thin, and his GP had recommended radiation therapy to alter his metabolism to help him gain weight. The treatment left his pituitary gland permanently damaged, so his weight ballooned.

He struggled to diet, though in his late 50s managed to lose about 3st. But his health was always undermined by his cigarette habit.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Griffiths’ greatest stage success was in The History Boys, which opened at the National Theatre in 2004, transferring to Broadway two years later and was made into a successful film. The role earned him a shelf-load of awards, including an Olivier and a Tony as best actor.

Griffiths played Hector, a sixth-form grammar school teacher coaching a talented class of 18-year-old boys into Oxbridge — while indulging his own fantasies with occasional fondles which the boys grudgingly accepted as the price of education.

He worked again with Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe on stage in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus in 2007, and taught Radcliffe how to take a bow — ‘Feel it. Remember it. Savour it.’

His irascible temper was never far from the surface, though.

On several occasions he halted theatre productions to lecture people whose mobiles went off. He would insist they left the auditorium before he would resume.

Once, he turned savagely on a woman whose phone trilled, and demanded: ‘Is that it, or will it be ringing some more? The 750 people here would be fully justified in suing you for ruining their afternoon.’

How typically Richard Griffiths.

He transformed the appalling violence and misery of his upbringing into inimitably angry performances that were sheer gold... the ultimate victory of talent over tragedy.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile




Griffiths earned an Olivier award for his role as inspiration teacher Hector in Alan Bennett's The History Boys

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile




riffiths also won a Tony award for portraying Hector in The History Boys

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile




The Queen presented him with an OBE for services to drama in 2008

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile




Griffiths starred as Vernon Dursley, uncle of Harry Potter in the film franchise

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=71595.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

Tags: