While his stage work won him awards, it was his corpulent, fastidious bachelor in Withnail & I that won our hearts
"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: 'I shall never play the Dane.'" Perhaps Richard Griffiths himself went through the traumatic realisation, famously declaimed by his great character Uncle Monty from Withnail & I – or perhaps not. He was never a leading man, not as such, although his leading role as the schoolmaster in the Alan Bennett play and movie The History Boys won him a raft of prizes. He was the quintessential supporting character actor, and his massive physical presence was lasered into the minds of a young generation as Harry Potter's malign foster father, Vernon Dursley.
But he had already owned the role that made him a legend while dozens of Hamlets had stumbled into the green room of obscurity. Griffiths was Uncle Monty in Bruce Robinson's great film: the corpulent, fastidious bachelor – lonely and predatory as a certain type of Oxford don – whose semi-derelict country cottage Withnail secures for the much-needed restorative weekend, having given Monty to understand that his cute friend Marwood will submit to his sexual advances.
Back in 1987, Griffiths was already a big man (although by the time of The History Boys, his mighty girth was equatorial indeed) and even in those days he looked older than his 40 years.
But he had a nimble-footed swiftness in Bruce Robinson's movie – as he bursts into the room after his cat ("The beastly ungrateful little swine.") and advances sinuously on Marwood as they prepare "the legumes" for Sunday lunch.
Above all, though, it was that glorious voice – everyone quotes Monty's lines from Withnail, but no one can do justice to Griffiths's resonant melancholy or the quick, thin-lipped snap of his sudden petulant temper. He had a wonderfully pained moan on the "never" in "never play the Dane". He relished the bizarre sensuality in "There is a certain je ne sais quoi about a firm young carrot". Was Griffiths comically recreating the exacting aestheticism of George Sanders's Lord Henry Wotton at this point? Maybe. It was unforgettably brilliant, anyway. And Monty's notorious, antisemitic description of his former agent's offices – "four floors up on the Charing Cross Road and never a job at the top of them" – had an inspired touch of Noël Coward in the final clipped syllables.
Most importantly, his Uncle Monty was a study of loneliness – his own loneliness, and the feared future loneliness of the failing actor Withnail, and all men, particularly a certain type of middle- and upper-middle-class Englishman, for whom women are an alien species. (Withnail is one of the most male films in cinema history.) And yet there is something heroic and defiant in Monty's recognition of his physical ruin: "There can be no true beauty without decay."
Richard Griffiths, that superb comic actor, found the role of a lifetime, grabbed it with both hands – a figure who combined Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek with a tiny cantankerous touch of Morrissey. We will all be grateful to him for creating this masterpiece.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/mar/29/richard-griffiths-uncle-monty
No comments:
Post a Comment