Versatile yet enigmatic actor could flit between light comedy and heavy drama

Paul Ritter actor b December 20, 1966 d April 5, 2021

For much of the past 10 years television viewers have enjoyed the trials and mishaps of Paul Ritter’s Martin Goodman, an eccentric, partially deaf and often shirtless father whose middle-class, Anglo-Jewish family come together for their weekly Shabbat meal in the sitcom Friday Night Dinner. Their evening is invariably interrupted by misunderstandings and moments of social awkwardness.

Playing Ritter’s wife, Jacqueline, was Tamsin Greig, whose main course at dinner he compliments with the line: ‘‘A lovely bit of squirrel, Jackie.’’ Another of his catchphrases was ‘‘I’m bloody boiling’’, uttered with fine comedic timing to nobody in particular.

Going topless required him to be reasonably strict about his diet. ‘‘I do steer clear of the very tempting puddings that the Friday Night Dinner caterers serve up and I go teetotal during filming,’’ he explained to Radio Times, adding, in his deadpan way: ‘‘That’s how you get to see the sculpted body that people so admire.’’

In another episode Goodman’s son Adam (Simon Bird) brings Emma, his girlfriend of nine weeks, to meet the family. ‘‘Just try and be normal for Adam’s girlfriend,’’ insists Jackie. ‘‘Of course I’ll be normal,’’ he replies in his harassed and distracted way, but for complicated plot reasons as he says this he is standing in the kitchen in his underwear with ketchup smeared over his chest. When Emma arrives his opening gambit is: ‘‘Has anyone in your family ever been murdered?’’

The show was filmed at a frenetic pace with little time to overthink the scenes. ‘‘They say comedy’s a serious business and we have to get a lot done in a shortish time,’’ he told an interviewer in 2014. ’’

Ritter’s range extended far beyond broad comedy, as he showed in Sky Atlantic’s mesmerising and award-winning 2019 drama Chernobyl. As Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief engineer at the stricken nuclear power plant, he is seen barking orders in arrogant denial about what his terrified underlings are reporting to him.

His character cannot come to terms with what has just happened: that the reactor itself has exploded and blown wide open, and that it cannot be shut down for the unavoidable reason it simply is not there any more. ‘‘He was a pretty uncompromising individual,’’ Ritter noted with some understatement.

Elsewhere he was the snakish butler Turton in the television adaptation of Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia (also with Greig), the wizard Eldred Worple, who offers to write Harry’s biography for him in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), and Guy Haines in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (2008), starring Daniel Craig and Judi Dench. Sixteen months ago he played Jeremy Hutchinson QC in the drama The Trial of Christine Keeler. Suggesting an uncommon degree of self-consciousness for an actor, he later admitted to having watched the first five episodes on iPlayer ‘‘and then deliberately ducked the last one – the one that I was in’’.

He was born Simon Paul Adams in Gravesend, Kent, into a Catholic family, in 1966. The son of Ken Adams, a tool maker who worked at various power stations, and Joan, a school secretary; he had four older sisters. It was not a showbusiness family, though his mother had been a classmate of Bernard Cribbins while his father attended the same school in Oldham as the comedian Eric Sykes, whom Ritter played in the television drama Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This (2014).

One of the few mentions he made of his father was in a New Zealand interview about Friday Night Dinner. ‘‘Lots of the mannerisms come from my own dear old, departed dad,’’ he said. ‘‘He was a very funny guy as well. There comes a point where we all turn into our dads and I’m well down that road at this point.’’

As a child, young Paul enjoyed watching television documentaries, including Michael Apsted’s Seven Up!. Musically he was drawn to Motorhead, explaining inscrutably that the rock band ‘‘got me through some very tough times as a teenager’’.

At school he took an A level in theatre studies, and read modern languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, though was not a member of Footlights. On graduating he spent a year at the German National Theatre in Hamburg, where, according to his wife, he spent his time carrying spears. On returning to Britain he took the German-sounding stage name Ritter because another Simon Adams was already registered with Equity.

He was a student with the actor Stephen Mangan and later they appeared together in a 2009 Broadway production of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests, for which Ritter received a Tony award nomination, a pairing they revived for the Old Vic’s staging in 2013.

By the 1990s Ritter was building up a roster of stage roles and was noticed by The Times in the 17th-century comedy A Woman is a Weathercock playing Pendant, an obsequious servant, at Pentameters Theatre, Hampstead. ‘‘He comes across as a sort of Blackadder with a sour plumb in his mouth,’’ observed Jeremy Kingston, the paper’s theatre critic. Before long he was being seen on TV, including in episodes of The Bill and Out of Hours.

He was nominated for an Olivier award for best supporting actor in 2006 for his part in the National Theatre’s staging of Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy. Seven years later he was a lachrymose John Major in The Audience, Peter Morgan’s 2013 play at the Gielgud Theatre starring Helen Mirren, about the Queen’s meetings with her prime ministers, using his Queen-time to bewail his fight with his backbenchers. Her Majesty proffers a handkerchief by way of consolation.

Ritter, a fan of Liverpool FC, enjoyed football broadcasts on the radio, recalling that as a child he was not allowed to stay up late for big events. As a result he ‘‘became obsessed with having my ear pressed to a tinny transistor’’, adding: ‘‘That thrill has never left me.’’

He is survived by his wife, Polly Radcliffe, a research fellow at King’s College London, whom he married in 1996, and by their sons Frank and Noah, both university students. During lockdown he sent video messages to community groups that had been making facemasks.

Reflecting on his shirtless character in Friday Night Dinner, Ritter seemed bemused. Certainly he had never imagined baring his chest on screen. ‘‘The topless idea was explained to me quite early on and like a fool I said, ‘Yeah, fine’,’’ he said. ‘‘One leaves one’s dignity at the door, I guess. There’s a great quote from Burt Kwouk talking about the Pink Panther films. He said, ‘Always take the work seriously, but not yourself.’ That’s what I’ve tried to do.’’

‘‘There comes a point where we all turn into our dads ...’’