Richard Griffiths was an actor from the old school. And by that I mean he liked a little nip before going onstage.
I met him a couple of times at Angus McIndoe’s, a bar across the street from the Broadhurst, the theater in which Griffiths delivered his Tony-winning performance as an unorthodox teacher in “The History Boys” in 2006.
He’d order a coffee and then tell the bartender to add “just a thimbleful of brandy.” He was very particular about the brandy. “It is going into the coffee,” he would say, “so I want the cheapest brandy you have.” He’d raise his voice: “You understand, the brandy is going into the coffee, so do not give me Remy Martin.”
After a sip of his brandy-laced coffee, he held up a hand and said, “Calms the nerves.”
Griffiths, who died at 65 over the weekend, was a delightful eccentric. He could be curmudgeonly, ticking off a list of complaints that would make Job blush, but there was always a little mischievous twinkle in his eye. And he laughed at himself.
“He took the work very, very seriously, but not himself,” says James Corden, who played one of the “History Boys.”
At the time of “The History Boys,” Griffiths was enormous. He had a 50-inch waist and, offstage, walked with a cane. He couldn’t climb the two flights of stairs to the third-floor bar at Angus: He used the elevator — “the freight elevator,” as he called it.
He didn’t enjoy all the glad-handing award ceremonies and cocktail parties he had to attend around Tony time because “it is too much effort to get to the food.”
After Julia Roberts saw the “The History Boys,” she went round to Griffiths’ dressing room, unannounced. She knocked on his door and when it opened, there he stood, all 300 pounds of him, in his underwear.
“Enter, my dear,” he said, then put on a robe and served her Champagne.
“I can’t go any further into this,” he told me, “but I think she’s after my body.”
Despite his size, he could be surprisingly nimble onstage. There was a moment in “The History Boys” that always brought down the house. When Corden, as a chunky, attention-grabbing student, started horsing around, Griffiths remained still and then — bam! — smacked him on the head, his hand moving like lightning.
“The slap could be quite hard if I wasn’t behaving myself onstage,” Corden says. “There were definitely times when it was Richard, not his character, hitting me. But then he’d wink at me as if to say, ‘You know why I did that.’ ”
Griffiths attributed his physicality to growing up around his parents, who, he said, were “profoundly deaf.” There was no music, no television, no BBC in the house. He invented his own sign language and acted out whatever he wanted to convey to his parents.
“You point at what you want, and then point where you want it,” he once said. “Or you will starve.”
His childhood wasn’t happy. His parents were dirt-poor — his father was a steelworker — and three of his siblings died. Two were stillborn. The third, his sister Mary, died a few days after her birth. His mother was holding Mary in her arms in the hospital bed. She nodded off and Mary slipped out of the bed and broke her neck.
“It completely clouded the marriage,” Griffiths told the BBC. “It became a desperately unhappy relationship because of that.”
It was a play about an unhappy marriage that sent him into the theater. At 17, he saw Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Before the end of the first act, Griffiths was determined to become an actor. His father had lined up a job for him in a steel mill. When Griffiths told him he wanted to study drama, his father “raged” at him.
Quickly, though, he established himself as a fine Shakespearean, playing Henry VIII and, of course, Bottom for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He became something of a cult figure as queeny Uncle Monty in “Withnail and I.”
“I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!” he says while chasing Paul McGann around the room.
But the role with which he’ll forever be identified is wicked Uncle Vernon in “Harry Potter.”
Griffiths liked the money but complained about the attention.
“I can’t go anywhere without being bothered by kids,” he told me. “Fortunately, Vernon is the most unsympathetic character, so the kids expect me to be horrible. And who am I to disoblige them? I mean, I love kids, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.”