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.
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