Hugh Griffith

Griffith was a Welsh character player, and character player is too polite a description of what he actually did, which was arrive in a film like weather. The BFI's Screenonline calls him a wild-eyed, formidable character player. He ran that register for more than forty years across upwards of a hundred stage, film and television productions.

The screen work here opens with a part in Night Train to Munich in 1940 and a small, delicious turn as the Lord High Steward in Kind Hearts and Coronets nine years later. Then Ben-Hur in 1959 gave him the sheikh and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, in a picture where hardly anybody else was permitted to have any fun. Four years after that, Tom Jones brought a second Oscar nomination for Squire Western: roaring, sozzled, entirely alive, and probably the performance to remember him by.

After that the pattern is the one that catches every great character actor, which is that everybody wants one scene of it. He is Charles Bonnet in How to Steal a Million, King Louis in Start the Revolution Without Me, Mandria in Exodus, the Magistrate in Oliver!, Alexander Smith in Mutiny on the Bounty, a rabbi in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Kenneth in Wuthering Heights, Sir January in The Canterbury Tales, the Caliph in Casanova & Co. The films get stranger and more European as the 1970s wear on and the parts get shorter, but he is never lazy in any of them. He was a cameo actor with a leading man's appetite.