Ralph Brown

Ralph Brown's parts tend to arrive late and stay a little too long, on purpose. He is the visitor in the sitcom, the man in the ensemble with the odd voice and the most words per minute, and the other people in the scene are usually waiting for him to leave. In Withnail & I (1987) he is Danny, the dealer, and it is still the role people know him by. In Him & Her (2010) he is Niguel, who has been unpleasant for long enough to be good at it. Across more than three decades the shape barely changes: a small part, a strong flavour, an exit.

He came to acting sideways, by way of a law degree and the Edinburgh Festival, and worked in theatre through the early 1980s before Bruce Robinson's film gave him Danny. What followed is the working actor's mixture: British television, supporting parts in British films and the occasional American job. Alien³ (1992) gave him Aaron, Wayne's World 2 (1993) gave him Del Preston, a roadie who is more or less Danny with a job, and The Phantom Menace (1999) put him in a pilot's seat as Ric Olié. He has said he built the CV deliberately, over five years, so that when American productions came to London they would already know his name, and that is roughly what the CV looks like. He also writes plays and screenplays, which may be why his characters so often sound as if they have prepared a speech.

The sitcom parts are where we have liked him best. In Nighty Night (2004) he turns up as Jacques and is briefly, gloriously seedy; in a show built around Julia Davis's Jill Tyrrell, being remembered from a handful of scenes is not a small thing. In Him & Her he and Camille Coduri, as Niguel and Shelly, are the older generation of a family of monsters, and they are the worst of it because they have had longer to practise. We tensed every time the pair of them arrived and relaxed when they left, which is exactly what Stefan Golaszewski wants from them and more than most sitcom relatives manage.

The reservation is the obvious one, and he has heard it. The reputation rests on a handful of cult parts and on one in particular; there have been few leads, and the franchise work is solid and is not what anyone remembers him for. Asked whether he minds being remembered for Danny, his answer was: "No. I’m proud of it. You have to be gracious." That seems to us the right attitude and also the right assessment. If you know him from Withnail, the two sitcoms are where to go next; if you know him from the sitcoms, you already know what he does, and Withnail is where it started.