Richard Griffiths had a big frame and a beautiful voice and he spent them on Englishmen who thought too well of themselves, making nearly all of them funny and a few of them sad. Monty in Withnail & I is the one to see.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Monty enter a room in Withnail & I (1987). Before he has said anything of consequence, Richard Griffiths has already told us who this man is: the pause before he speaks, the way the voice comes up from somewhere deep and settles on each word as if it were worth the wait. We said in our review that he gives Monty a luxuriant sense of his own importance that makes him funny before the writing has finished the job, and that is the whole trick. Most actors wait for the line. Griffiths had the laugh in hand before the line arrived.
He came to it the slow way. After drama school he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1970s and played the clowns and the supporting parts, and film work in the late 1970s and 1980s did little for him until Bruce Robinson cast him as Monty. That performance is still the one people mean when they say his name. The BBC gave him a lead in Pie in the Sky (1994 to 1997), a detective who would sooner be running his restaurant, and then a decade as Vernon Dursley across five Harry Potter films (2001 to 2010) made him the tyrannical uncle for a generation of children who had never heard of Camden. On stage, The History Boys (2004 to 2006) gave him Hector, a teacher, and the film version followed in 2006. Nicholas Hytner directed him twice on film and understood that the bulk and the voice could carry authority as easily as they carried bluster.
The parts were nearly always the same man: pompous, bumbling, or predatory, middle-aged, English, in a period coat or a cardigan. Griffiths knew this, and the interesting thing is how much he found inside it. Monty is a comic monster for an hour and then, in a stretch we will not describe, something else, and we laughed at him and then felt for him more than we expected to, because he never once played the loneliness; he let it show through the appetite. Petulance, melancholy and a rather alarming sensuality sit together in that performance and none of them cancels the others out.
The cinema did not always know what to do with him. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) gives him a wig and one scene as King George and then gets on with the chase. It is a film we scored 45, and he is one of the few things in it we can remember. That is roughly the shape of his late film career: a big supporting turn dropped into something that did not deserve it.
He died in 2013. Asked about the people who still quote Withnail & I at him, he said, "They know the lines, the dialogue, it's all a bit scary." They know the lines because of how he said them. Start there, and forgive the films that only wanted him for a scene.
Biography
Richard Griffiths (31 July 1947 – 28 March 2013) was an English actor of film, television and stage. He trained at Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama and began his career in the 1970s.
Griffiths was known for his role as Uncle Monty in Withnail & I (1987) and as Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2010). On television he played Henry Crabbe in Pie in the Sky (1994–1997). For his performance as Hector in the stage play The History Boys he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, a Laurence Olivier Award, the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award; the 2006 film adaptation earned him a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008.
