Richard Griffiths Dead at 65 After Surgery
Richard Griffiths in The Habit of Art (2009), whose play-within-a-play structure enabled him to portray both WH Auden and a tetchy actor worrying about his lines. Photograph: ArenaPAL/Johan Persson
Richard Griffiths, who has died aged 65 from complications following heart surgery, was a fine actor defined by his largeness of spirit, his comic instinct and his empathy with outsiders, as well as his undeniable physical size. He was the kind of actor whom everyone remembers with affection, whether as the flawed but inspirational Hector in Alan Bennett's The History Boys (first staged in 2004, then filmed in 2006) or as the eccentrically gay Uncle Monty in Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I (1987).
Like most actors who have a thriving career in film and television, he learned his craft in theatre. I first became aware of him in the late 1970s when he rose steadily through the ranks of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was especially struck by his ability to speak verse with mellifluous clarity. As co-presenter of a BBC TV arts programme, I hired him in the runup to the 1979 general election, to read passages of Shakespeare that seemed appropriate to a bitter political contest. I recall his modesty, charm and, given his subsequent career in television, surprising nervousness. Needless to say, he did an outstanding job.
What was fascinating about Griffiths's career was his triumph over what, to others, might have seemed insuperable obstacles. He was not born into the theatrical purple and was not naturally endowed with leading-man good looks. He was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His childhood was not easy, since both his steelworker father, Thomas, and his mother, Jane, were deaf and, at an early age, he had to learn sign language to communicate with them. He left his Catholic school at 15 and found consolation in the theatre: first by taking drama classes at Stockton and Billingham Technical College and then by becoming a student at Manchester Polytechnic's drama school.
He settled for a time in Manchester, did the rounds of local theatres and got an early break in films, with a small role in It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet (1977). It was his work at the RSC that transformed his career. Given his roly-poly appearance, he started off in minor comic roles: an officer in Trevor Nunn's musicalised The Comedy of Errors in 1976 and the big-bummed Pompey in Measure for Measure in 1978. Soon the RSC realised that Griffiths had a natural authority on stage. He was superbly flustered as the King of Navarre in John Barton's memorably autumnal Love's Labour's Lost (1978), and a year later played the dimwitted hero who becomes a studio bigwig in Nunn's buoyant revival of George Kaufman and Moss Hart's satire on Hollywood, Once in a Lifetime.
By then, Griffiths had become noticed as a distinctive character actor with a peculiar mix of grace and solemnity, and throughout the 1980s he was busy in TV and film. In 1982 he played the lead in a BBC drama serial about a computer conspiracy, Birds of Prey. A succession of noted film roles, in Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), Britannia Hospital (1982), A Private Function (1984) and Greystoke (1984), led to his unforgettable appearance in Withnail and I. In one famous scene, the life-loving, genially promiscuous Uncle Monty bursts into the bedroom of the alcoholic hero's best friend to announce his desire to have him – "even if it must be burglary".
Firmly established as a national favourite, Griffiths went on to appear as Henry Crabbe, the gourmand and disillusioned cop, in the TV series Pie in the Sky (1994-97), and from 2001 onwards he was a fixture in the Harry Potter films as Uncle Vernon Dursley. Although film and TV work continued to flood in – his later credits included Roger Michell's Venus (2006) and Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) – it was in the theatre, particularly with his performance as Hector in The History Boys at the National, that he confirmed his star status. It was a tricky role, since Hector was both a brilliant teacher and a habitual boy-groper. Griffiths's great achievement was to show that Hector was a natural life-enhancer, getting the boys to improve their French by impersonating the inhabitants of a bordello, and a deeply flawed human being. Griffiths won Olivier and Tony awards, in London and New York, for his compassionate study of this natural outsider, and repeated his performance in Nicholas Hytner's film version.
He returned to the London stage in 2007 to play the role of the desiccated psychiatrist who envies a damaged young boy's capacity for ecstasy, in Peter Shaffer's Equus. As Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe played the boy – and at one point appeared stark naked – the production was a box-office triumph, but Griffiths lacked the intellectual dynamism of the role's originator, Alec McCowen.
Griffiths, who was made an OBE in 2008, seemed much more at ease back at the National in 2009, playing WH Auden (replacing an ill Michael Gambon in the role) in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. The complex play-within-a-play structure allowed Griffiths to portray both Auden – the apostle of freedom and intellectual bully – and a tetchy actor worried about his lines and missing a lucrative voiceover engagement. Griffiths's capacity for grumpiness was used to great comic effect in his final appearance on the London stage, last summer, in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. As one half of a vaudevillian double act with Danny DeVito, briefly united and bound together by mutual loathing, Griffiths made the precise placement of a chair seem a matter of cosmic significance.
Clearly Griffiths himself had a short fuse: three times in recent years he stopped a performance in its tracks to inveigh against interruption from mobile phones, although it is fair to say that he was always applauded by similarly outraged spectators. But he was not an actor who will be remembered for his indignation. What we shall all recall, with pleasure, is his silvery voice, his genial presence and his priceless ability to empathise with characters who, for whatever reason, exist somewhere on the margins of conventional society.
He is survived by his wife, Heather, whom he married in 1980.
• Richard Griffiths, actor, born 31 July 1947; died 28 March 2013
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