Actor Griffiths played uncle in Potter films
Versatile Brit worked with Radcliffe early in career
LONDON — Richard Griffiths, a versatile British actor who won a Tony Award for The History Boys and played the boy wizard’s unsympathetic Uncle Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter movies, has died. He was 65.
Agent Simon Beresford said on Friday that Griffiths had died a day earlier of complications after heart surgery at University Hospital in Coventry, central England. Beresford paid tribute to Griffiths as “a remarkable man and one of our greatest and bestloved actors.”
Griffiths appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, but will be most widely remembered as a pair of contrasting uncles — flamboyant Uncle Monty in the 1980s cult classic Withnail & I and the hero’s grudging Muggle guardian in the Harry Potter series.
Griffiths once said he liked playing Uncle Vernon “because that gives me a licence to be horrible to kids.”
But Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe paid tribute to the actor, saying: “I was proud to say I knew him.”
A huge stage presence, Griffiths was one of Britain’s leading theatre actors, creating roles including the charismatic teacher Hector at the emotional heart of Alan Bennett’s school drama The History Boys — a part he took to Broadway, winning a Tony, and repeated for the film adaptation.
Griffiths also played poet W. H. Auden in Bennett’s The Habit of Art.
Griffiths was born in northeast England’s Thornaby- on- Tees in 1947 to parents who were deaf and mute — an experience he felt contributed to his exceptional ability to listen and to communicate physically.
He left school at 15 but later studied drama and spent a decade with the Royal Shakespeare Company, making a specialty of comic parts such as the buffoonish knight Falstaff.
On television, he played a crime- solving chef in the 1990s British TV series Pie in the Sky, and he had parts in movies ranging from Chariots of Fire and Gandhi to The Naked Gun 2 ½ .
Known for his sense of humour, large store of rambling theatrical anecdotes and occasional bursts of temper, Griffiths was renowned for shaming audience members whose cellphones rang during plays by stopping the performance and ordering the offender to leave.
Griffiths’s last major stage role was in a West End production of Neil Simon’s comedy The Sunshine Boys last year opposite Danny DeVito. The pair had been due to reprise their roles in Los Angeles later this year.
In 2007, he appeared in a London and Broadway production of Equus alongside the then- 17- year- old Radcliffe.
“Richard was by my side during two of the most important moments of my career,” Radcliffe said Friday.
Griffiths is survived by his wife, Heather Gibson.