Richard Griffiths

Richard Thomas Griffiths, born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1947, spent the first decade of his screen career in the background of British prestige cinema. He is in Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Ragtime, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Britannia Hospital, Gorky Park, Greystoke and Superman II, usually for a line or two, usually as a porter, a clerk or an official. Character actors of that generation built careers this way, and the work is invisible until you go looking for it.

Withnail and I changed that in 1987. Uncle Monty is a great comic creation because Griffiths plays him without a single wink: the grandiosity, the appalling appetite, the sudden collapses into genuine loneliness are all delivered as though the man believes every word, which is what makes the film's cruelty land and its sadness stick. He worked the same register on television as Henry Crabbe in Pie in the Sky across four years, and again on screen in The History Boys, where the whole performance runs on a teacher's charm and the audience's growing unease about it.

To most of the world he is Vernon Dursley, across five Harry Potter films from 2001 to 2011, a role built almost entirely out of a reddening neck and a refusal to acknowledge magic. It is a very small part played with total commitment, which was his method everywhere. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008 and died in 2013. King Ralph, Guarding Tess, Venus, Hugo and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides fill out the later years.