Early Life
Richard Griffiths was born on July 31, 1947, in Thornaby-on-Tees, North Riding of Yorkshire, England. Both of his parents were deaf: Thomas Griffiths, a steelworker, and Jane Denmark, a bagger. Griffiths learned British Sign Language to communicate with them.
An elder sister and two brothers died in infancy before he was born; only a younger brother survived. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. At eight years old he had radiation therapy on his pituitary gland because he was underweight, a treatment that left him battling obesity for the rest of his life.
Restless and unhappy, he ran away from home more than once as a child. His formal education ended at 15, when he left Our Lady & St Bede School in Stockton-on-Tees for a job as a porter at Littlewoods. His boss persuaded him to go back to school, and he took a drama class at Stockton & Billingham College. He later trained at the Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre, now the Manchester School of Theatre.
Early Career & First Roles
Griffiths began his professional acting career in 1974 with a role in an episode of the television series 'Crown Court'. He joined the BBC Radio Drama Company and worked on vocal performance and storytelling. At the same time he built his stage reputation in small theatres, sometimes acting and sometimes managing, and he had a gift for Shakespearean clown roles.
His early film work began with 'It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet' (1976). In the early 1980s he took supporting roles in the Best Picture winners 'Chariots of Fire' (1981) and 'Gandhi' (1982), and in the literary adaptation 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (1981).
Major Roles
Griffiths’ career ran across stage, television and film. He never took the traditional leading man path. Two roles in particular define him: the gentle, food-loving detective Henry Crabbe and the schoolmaster Hector.
Detective Inspector Henry Crabbe in 'Pie in the Sky' (1994–1997)
Griffiths played Detective Inspector Henry Crabbe in 'Pie in the Sky'. The premise was neatly subversive: a detective who wants to retire after 25 years and run a restaurant is refused permission to leave, and a bribery charge he did not commit is used to keep him in uniform. He is pulled back into cases whenever his chief needs him. He cracks them with his cooking and his insight into people.
Crabbe was not a hard-boiled, tormented detective but a decent, patient man with a dry wit. Griffiths’ physicality—his expressive face, his deliberate movements—carried a man who found joy in making food and irritation in the bureaucracy of his former job.
Crabbe’s authority was quiet. He solved crimes by watching people and understanding what they wanted, usually over a well-cooked meal. The show argued that a man could be judged as much by his pastry as by his solved case files. Crabbe had ordinary habits and a steady sense of right and wrong, which is why viewers liked him.
It was a part that let Griffiths draw affection and respect at the same time. He treated the making of a steak and kidney pie with the same weight another actor might give a soliloquy. He led the show for five series and 40 episodes, with gentle charisma rather than force.
Hector in 'The History Boys' (2006)
If Henry Crabbe showed Griffiths’ ease with gentle, televisual realism, Hector in Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys' showed the full reach of his theatrical power. The part won him the Olivier Award for Best Actor in 2005 and the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2006. Hector is an eccentric English teacher at a Sheffield grammar school who fills his boys with a love of literature, and whose affectionate pats cross professional lines.
Griffiths made Hector magnetic and unpredictable, quoting poetry and leading sing-alongs. The boys, like the audience, were taken in by his intellect and his genuine, misguided passion for them. He played the darkness under the bluster, and the loneliness.
Hector was never a monster and never a saint, only a contradiction, and Griffiths kept the balance. The performance was funny and sad, often in the same scene. Many consider it the best work of his career.
Other Notable Work
His filmography is full of memorable small parts. In 'The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear' (1991) he played the befuddled nuclear scientist Dr. Albert S. Meinheimer (aka Earl Hacker), and gave the slapstick a confused dignity. From 2001 he played Vernon Dursley, Harry's uncle, in five of the eight Harry Potter films.
In the 2005 BBC 'Bleak House' he played Mr. Bayham Badger, the same part he had taken in the 1985 serial. He worked with Tim Burton as the pompous Magistrate Philipse in 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999) and with Martin Scorsese as Monsieur Frick in 'Hugo' (2011). He also did voice work, as the Vogon Jeltz in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (2005) and as Slartibartfast in the radio adaptations of Douglas Adams' series.
He treated every part the same way, whatever its size.
Guest Roles Worth Remembering
Canon Humphrey Appleton in 'Inspector Morse' (1993)
In 'The Day of the Devil', the second episode of Inspector Morse's seventh series, first shown on 13 January 1993, Griffiths plays Canon Humphrey Appleton, an occult scholar brought in to explain the mind of John Peter Barrie, a rapist who escapes from a prison infirmary and believes he is at war with the devil. Appleton's lectures pull against the clinical evidence of Barrie's former therapist, Dr Esther Martin, played by Harriet Walter, as Morse hunts a man using a succession of elaborate disguises.
Daniel Boyle wrote the episode and Stephen Whittaker directed it. The canon is one of two experts pulling the investigation in opposite directions, the occult against the psychiatric, and the part asks for authority rather than display: a scholar in a study, reasoning about the devil, in the middle of a manhunt.
Derek Farrow in 'Minder' (1982)
Griffiths appears in 'Dreamhouse', the fifth episode of Minder's third series, first shown on 10 February 1982. Terry is hired to house-sit for Frankie Farrow, a sixties singer said to be away on a Las Vegas engagement. Frankie's brother Derek turns up, and the house turns out to be less of a dream than the job suggested: the engagement is a circuit of working men's clubs, Frankie is broke, and the bailiffs are on their way.
He plays Derek with a tiredness that suits a man watching his brother's life come apart, and the episode, written by Andrew Payne and Leon Griffiths and directed by Tom Clegg, is one of the few Minder stories with no scam to fix it. Griffiths had a decade of television ahead of him before Crabbe.
Acting Style
Griffiths was a big man who moved quietly. He used his presence with care, often carrying a moment with a raised eyebrow, a sigh or a deliberate pause. He was as good without words as with them, a skill rooted in signing with his deaf parents as a child.
He moved between broad comedy and tragedy, between Shakespearean verse and modern sitcom dialogue, always clearly. He prepared thoroughly and never played down to a part, giving a blockbuster like 'Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' the same attention as a National Theatre production. His authority figures and his eccentrics were both recognizable men.
Personal Life
He married actress Heather Gibson in 1980 and they had no children; the marriage lasted until his death. Colleagues spoke of his kindness to younger actors and of his practical jokes on set.
He read widely and could recite Shakespeare and other classics at length. He kept his working-class Yorkshire background and stayed away from crowds and celebrity. Friends remembered a great, rumbling laugh.
In closing...
Griffiths worked as an actor for 39 years and never settled into one kind of part: Shakespearean clown, sitcom lead, detective, schoolmaster, Vernon Dursley. The crime work that matters here is one lead in Pie in the Sky and guest appearances like the Morse episode above. He is occasionally misnamed as Mark Griffiths. The actor raised by deaf parents in North Yorkshire is Richard Griffiths, born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1947.