JamesM

Another familair face in Britsh cinema, especially in the work of the Boulting Brothers, as well as documentary maker and activist, has gone.

R. I. P.

MrDrakesDuck

One of those familiar faces who's always a pleasure to watch.

"I thought I had to shoot Germans, not chew 'em"

Fellwanderer

Agreed. One of my favourites.

He certainly won't have gone off quietly into the night!

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

Michael Loser CBE

My favourite Kenneth Griffith moment...

In ONLY TWO CAN PLAY, Kenneth Griffith appears before an interview panel for the post
of senior librarian in a small Welsh town. One of the interviewers is
a local government official [played by the wonderful Raymond Huntley....]

Interviewer (Huntley studies the application form) : Your name?
Kenneth: Dafydd Gwyllym Llewellyn Morgan-Jenkins
Interviewer (Huntley raises eyebrow) : Are you Welsh ?


If you have Brian McFarlane's AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BRITISH CINEMA, a collection of interviews with film folks,
there is an excellent interview with Kenneth Griffith......

Michael Loser CBE

From The Independent

26 June 2006

Obituary
Kenneth Griffith
Actor and documentary-maker

Kenneth Griffiths (Kenneth Griffith), actor and documentary film-maker: born
Tenby, Pembrokeshire, 12 October 1921; married first Joan Stock (two sons,
marriage dissolved), second Doria Noar (one daughter, marriage dissolved),
third Carole Hagar (one daughter, one son, marriage dissolved); died London
25 June 2006.

The actor and documentary film-maker Kenneth Griffith was one of the most
distinguished trouble-makers of his time. He could exasperate colleagues by
his cantankerous manner and stout refusal to compromise his artistic and
professional integrity, especially when offered work by those whom he called
the "priggish cuckoos" of the BBC's middle management. Even those who were
kind to him found he would insist on marching to a different drum.

On one occasion, after he had started rewriting someone else's script so
that he would have a bigger part in it, one of the Boulting brothers, who
often employed him, was driven to exclaim: "Why are you always so difficult,
Kenneth?"

The answer was far from straightforward. Griffith was a complicated man and,
although he wrote an autobiography in an attempt to explain himself, there
was a demon in his personality with which he never came, and never wanted to
come, to terms. He had a genuine flair for friendship and could be charming
in the company of those whom he respected, but cultivated his reputation as
a member of the Awkward Squad most assiduously. He would plough his own
furrow whatever the cost - and sometimes it cost him dearly.

The subjects he chose for his documentaries were calculated to upset the
British establishment by virtue of their partisan view of imperial history:
Napoleon (he savoured the fact that Boney had struck terror in English
hearts); the War of American Independence (he was in favour of it); the
Untouchables in India (he argued for their social emancipation and was
president of their society); the Anglo-Boer War (he took the side of the
Afrikaners); Irish republicanism (he was a keen supporter of Sinn Féin); the
British throne (he thought the House of Windsor had a bogus claim); and so
on, in more than two dozen documentaries which are among the most brilliant,
and controversial, ever made in Britain. Never one to sit on the fence, he
once told Huw Wheldon: "I would never stoop so low as to be objective about
anything."

Griffith's support for a united Ireland was given fullest expression in his
films about Michael Collins, Hang Up Your Brightest Colours (1973), and
Roger Casement, Roger Casement: heart of darkness (1992), in both of which
the British government's record in Ireland was roundly castigated. The film
about Collins, which begins by quoting his remark "There is no Irish
problem, only an English problem", was rejected by Sir Lew Grade at the
behest of the IBA and it was to be some 21 years before the BBC would screen
it, after which Griffith was taken to the hearts of Republicans in Belfast.
A visit to their enclaves in 1993, shortly after the hunger strike that led
to the deaths of Bobby Sands and others, confirmed his belief that the
British should pull out of the six counties of Ulster, and thereafter he
always wore a green ribbon in his coat.

Kenneth Griffith was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, in 1921. He attributed
his affection for the Irish to the fact that he was Welsh, albeit from that
part of Pembrokeshire that had for long been known as "Little England beyond
Wales" because it had been settled by Flemish and English weavers soon after
the Norman Conquest.

There was an element of guilt in his sense of Welshness, primarily because
it was a compatriot, namely David Lloyd George, who had been largely
responsible for the partitioning of Ireland in 1922. This feeling was
subsumed by his admiration for what he saw as "the true Celtic spirit" - a
passionate response to life that has no place for the dry formalities of the
English ruling class - and the essence of which he cherished in his Irish
friends Tyrone Guthrie and Peter O'Toole.

Apart from his support for Sinn Féin, Griffith had no party allegiance, for
he had a horror of joining anything. In his autobiography, The Fool's Pardon
(1994), he described himself as "not a red, but a convinced, though often
confused, democrat", and towards the end of his life he did not demur when
called "a radical Tory". Yet one of his best documentaries is The Most
Valuable Englishman Ever (1982), a study of the egalitarian Tom Paine. Nor
did he have any time for trades unions: his Equity membership card was
stamped "Under protest".

The instinct to be his own man had been ingrained in him from an early age.
His parents having separated while he was still a small child, he was
brought up at Penally, near Tenby, by his paternal grandparents, staunch
Wesleyan Methodists who taught him to question everything.

If there was something of the sermon in his films, he gladly acknowledged
the influence of the Nonconformist chapel of his boyhood - especially the
histrionics of the old-time preachers who, with blazing eyes and fiery
tongue, had enthralled and terrified him as a child.

The prolonged absence of his mother left an indelible mark on him. "I have
never been able to totally forgive my mother for leaving me; therefore I
have never been able to love her," he wrote in his autobiography, adding, "I
have a deeply aggressive wariness towards women which has left a trail of
domestic disaster behind me." He admitted to having spent most of his life
in "an emotional mess": all three of his marriages ended in divorce,
although he enjoyed a warm relationship with at least two of his former
wives and his five children.

He first entertained hopes of becoming an actor at Green Hill Grammar School
in Tenby, where he was encouraged by Miss Evelyn Ward, an English teacher,
who remained one of his most trusted friends. His performance in a school
play was praised by a local newspaper and he forthwith decided to pursue a
career in the theatre. Called to an interview with his headmaster, J.T.
Griffith, he was advised to drop the s in his surname because it was a mark
of anglicisation, and allowed to leave school before his 16th birthday and
with no academic qualifications.

In 1937 Griffith made his début as a professional actor at the Festival
Theatre in Cambridge, where Peter Hoare cast him as Cinna the Poet in Julius
Caesar; he then played Danny in the West Pier Company's production of Emlyn
Williams's Night Must Fall in Tenby and took a very small part in Thomas
Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. With bigger parts in Little Ladyship, The
Corn is Green and Boys in Brown, he gained experience in treading the boards
of repertory theatre.

Michael Loser CBE

Griffith had barely had a chance to break into the cinema before the Second
World War began. He served with the RAF, mostly in Canada. Often in trouble
with the military authorities for minor misdemeanours such as imitating the
officers, he used the opportunity to read as widely as he could, though his
choice of books was nothing if not unorthodox. On his last visit to Tenby
before conscription, he had asked his grandparents to give him, as a
farewell present, an English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf so that he
could better understand the causes of the conflict in which he was about to
become involved, and he may have been the only British soldier to carry that
book about with him for the duration.

Declared unfit to fly after contracting scarlet fever and now weighing only
seven stone, he was invalided out of the RAF in 1942.

He resumed his career in the theatre with Tyrone Guthrie's Old Vic in
Liverpool, playing the Chorus in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, but, never at
ease with himself as a stage actor, found he preferred the discipline of the
cinema. His first screen role had been in Love on the Dole (1941) and over
the next 50 years he was to appear in more than 80 films. Many are now
forgotten - by his own admission, he did a lot of inferior work - but some
stand out: Lucky Jim (1957), A Night to Remember (1958), I'm All Right, Jack
(1959), The Lion in Winter (1968), The Wild Geese (1978), Who Dares Wins
(1982), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and The Englishman Who Went Up a
Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995).

When he was not playing villains or eccentrics - he claimed passengers would
take one look at him in a train compartment and hurriedly leave - he
specialised in stereotypical parts as a malevolent Welshman, in which he put
on an accent which did not win him many fans in Wales. Even so, as the
obsequious Ieuan Jenkins who competes against Peter Sellers's John Lewis for
promotion to a sub-librarian's post in Only Two Can Play (1962), a film
version of Kingsley Amis's novel That Uncertain Feeling, set in Swansea, he
made a lot of us laugh.

From about 1965 he began to move away from the cinema to the making of
documentaries, partly because they afforded him almost complete control of
the medium. His film Soldiers of the Widow (1972), about the siege and
relief of Ladysmith during the first Boer War, was the first to be made out
of his obsession with South Africa. It was followed by an even more
hard-hitting documentary, Black as Hell: Thick as Grass (1979), about the
Impis' attack on the South Wales Borderers' outpost at Rorke's Drift in
1879, in which he played the parts of both British officers and Zulu
warriors.

Among other documentaries he made were A Touch of Churchill, a Touch of
Hitler (1971), a corrosive indictment of Cecil Rhodes; The Sun's Bright
Child (1975), a life of the actor Edmund Keane, whose memory he revered; The
Light (1986), a typically one-sided view of David Ben Gurion, Zionism and
the creation of the State of Israel; and But I Have Promises to Keep (1989),
a sympathetic portrait of Nehru that was nevertheless suppressed in India.

In most of these films Griffith appeared as himself - hectoring, loquacious,
cranky, wild-eyed, combative, tub-thumping, and utterly riveting in the way
he delivered his invective and used the camera to maximum effect.

It is inevitable that opinions of the maverick Kenneth Griffith, especially
among documentary buffs, will vary widely. Some critics have been perturbed
by his taking so many parts in his own productions - Christ, Napoleon,
Hitler, and so on. One, writing in The Times in 1986, commented that he
would not be surprised if Griffith were one day to play all the roles in
Gone with the Wind. Others have taken the sterner view that his
documentaries are merely egotistical exercises in polemic and have only
negligible cinematic merit.

Despite these strictures, however, it is generally agreed that his work
provides a jolt to complacency and invites the viewer to reconsider
conventional wisdom regarding some of the less honourable episodes in
British colonial history.

Meic Stephens

DB7

Shame, I was only watching him in The Naked Truth a few nights back. He seemed to spend most of the 50s with either Sellers or the Boulting Brothers.

smudge

Another who will be sorely missed. Just been relaxing with a bottle of wine and his comic turn as Napoleon in THE PRISONER : The Girl Who Was Death, as a little tribute.

R.I.P. Kenneth.

Respect,

SMUDGE

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

julian_craster

The Times June 27, 2006

Obituary: Kenneth Griffith
October 12, 1921 - June 25, 2006

Actor and film-maker who exasperated the Establishment with his undeviating
commitment to the victims of British colonialism


A PERFORMER of Welsh passion and manic energy, Kenneth Griffith used a
distinctive screen presence to carve out two separate careers. As a prolific
actor in films and on television he rarely rose above supporting roles, but
he had the knack of producing screen-stealing performances which were
remembered long after more weighty contributions.
Perhaps more importantly he brought his thespian qualities to a series of
highly personal film documentaries, distinguished by his frenetic style.
Griffith appeared not only as a very visible presenter but acted all the
parts. His restless histrionics could irritate but they compelled attention.

Equally distinctive was his political outlook, the common link being an
angry denunciation of the British imperial record in Africa, India and,
closer to home, in Ireland. Griffith made no secret of his support for Irish
republicanism, regarding the British presence in Northern Ireland as an
outrage. He was also a fervent champion of the state of Israel.

In breaking the rule that TV programmes should show political balance,
Griffith brought to the medium a transparent honesty, though his unashamedly
partisan treatments of historical subjects often gave offence and landed him
in trouble.

Most notoriously his film about the Irish republican leader Michael Collins,
entitled Hang Out Your Brightest Colours, was banned in 1973 by Sir Lew
Grade, chief executive of ATV, “in view of the delicate military and
political situation in Northern Ireland”. It was not finally transmitted
until 1994.

Another casualty, for different reasons, was a film about Lord Baden-Powell
and the Siege of Mafeking. In its stand against apartheid the technicians’
union, ACCT, ordered Griffith and his unit not to film in South Africa and
the project was cancelled. Given Griffith’s hatred of the apartheid regime,
the boycott was ironic.

He was born Kenneth Griffiths (he dropped the “s” when he became an actor,
having been told by a schoolteacher that it was an Anglicism) in Tenby,
Pembrokeshire, in 1921, and had a difficult childhood. Abandoned by his
parents, who separated when he was six months old, he was brought up by
grandparents. Home life became harder when his grandfather went bankrupt
during the Depression.

He attended the local grammar school but showed little academic promise and
left at 15. But thanks to an English teacher, who gave him parts in school
plays, notably in a production of Richard of Bordeaux, he got the taste for
acting and decided to make it his career.

It was a brave decision, requiring much determination, and the early years
were tough and hungry. His first acting job was at the Festival Theatre,
Cambridge, in 1937. By 1940 he had started to get small parts in films. He
served in the RAF during the Second World War — he was invalided out in 1942
because of illness — and after it he returned to repertory and joined Tyrone
Guthrie’s company at the Old Vic.

But he gradually abandoned the stage for cinema and television. He became a
regular player in British films, particularly associated with Boulting
Brothers comedies such as Lucky Jim, I’m All Right Jack and Rotten to the
Core. He claimed to have lost count of the films he appeared in but it was
probably between 80 and 100. His most memorable screen appearance was in
Only Two Can Play (1962), an adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s novel, That
Uncertain Feeling. With a South Wales setting Griffith was on home ground
and he made the most of it with a fine comic-pathetic portrayal of Ap
Jenkins, colleague and foil to Peter Sellers’s adulterous librarian.

On television he was an effective Napoleon in an ITV production of Tolstoy’s
War and Peace in 1963. In the early 1970s on BBC2 he starred in a Welsh
sitcom, Perils of Pendragon, as a sexually repressed man battling against
the sins of the flesh. Even here he was involved in controversy, with one
episode deemed too political to be shown near the 1974 general election and
held over.

Griffith, encouraged by David Attenborough at the BBC, moved into
documentary in the 1960s and soon established his distinctive style.
Although he liked to describe himself “as the most suppressed film-maker
Britain has had”, and rarely had a smooth ride from the television
authorities, he managed an impressive output.

Early projects reflected his fascination with the colonial history of
southern Africa. His subjects included the relief of Ladysmith during the
Boer War, a portrait of Cecil Rhodes (provocatively entitled A Touch of
Churchill, A Touch of Hitler) and four films on the Boer War in general, for
which he interviewed many of its survivors.

He returned to Napoleon in The Man on the Rock, charting the Emperor’s last
years on St Helena, before turning to Ireland with a film about the Easter
Rising and the postwar struggle for independence that was again based on
interviews with surviving participants. Like the Michael Collins
documentary, it was banned.

The American War of Independence was another colonial struggle which gave
Griffith a natural topic, and he singled out his 1982 BBC film on Tom Paine,
the pamphleteer who supported the American cause, as the one he would like
to be remembered for. The title summed up Griffith’s admiration for his
subject: The Most Valuable Englishman Ever.

Among his other subjects were the 18th-century actor Edmund Kean, Clive of
India, the Indian leader, Jawaharlal Nehru and David Ben-Gurion, father of
Israel. He returned to Irish affairs with a sympathetic treatment of Roger
Casement, who was hanged by the British, while The Legend of George Rex
investigated an alleged illegitimate son of George III.
The centenary of the outbreak of the Boer War in 1999 found Griffith in
typically combative mood in a two-part documentary for BBC2. Wearing a Sinn
Fein emblem to show his support for republican prisoners in Northern
Ireland, he declared that “imperialism is as evil a concept as humankind has
ever devised” and accused the British of atrocities.

For his documentaries he was able to draw on his vast collection of British
Empire postal memorabilia, which included some 25,000 items, envelopes and
postcards relating to the Boer War alone.

He published a richly detailed autobiography, The Fool’s Pardon, in 1994. He
was less prominent as an actor in later years, but cameo appearances in the
1990s films Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Englishman Who Went Up a
Hill but Came Down a Mountain and Very Annie Mary (2001) showed that his
ability to steal a scene was undiminished. The latter film, 60 years after
his first, meant that he had the distinction of having had the longest
screen career of any Welsh actor.

On the occasion of a celebration of that career at the Chapter Arts Centre,
Cardiff, in 2001, he told an interviewer: “Death cannot be too far off for
me. I do not want to die lacking the courage to tell the truth. That is what
I have done in my films.”

Griffith’s three marriages, all of which were dissolved, produced three sons
and two daughters.

Kenneth Griffith, actor, writer and documentary film-maker, was born on
October 12, 1921. He died June 25, 2006, aged 84.

julian_craster

Daily Telegraph

Kenneth Griffith: Obituary
27/06/2006

Kenneth Griffith, who died on Sunday aged 84, began his career as a
first-rate small part actor before becoming a documentary film-maker.

He specialised in contentious films about British imperial history, and he
invariably challenged orthodox views, particularly with regard to Ireland,
South Africa and India. One such documentary - Hang Out Your Brightest
Colours: The Life and Death of Michael Collins (1973), about the
assassinated IRA leader - was banned by the Independent Broadcasting
Authority (IBA), and not shown until 1994.

"Every time the IRA strikes mainland Britain," Griffith once said, "someone
asks, 'Why oh why?' For over 20 years I've been trying to communicate
exactly why." He often found support from influential figures in the arts.
Huw Wheldon and David Attenborough at the BBC had orginally encouraged him
to make documentaries; and Peter O'Toole, a friend, remarked: "Griffith
exemplifies the quixotic. There isn't a windmill he won't tilt at."

As an actor Griffith played unsavoury characters - eccentrics, perverts,
petty thieves and blackmailers - whose shifty looks and nervous twitches
were never less than arresting. But from the mid-1960s his documentaries
were to dominate his life, as would the struggle to get them broadcast.

"In my time," he said, "I've been accused of being a Marxist, a fascist, a
traitor and, probably worst in most people's eyes, inconsistent. I was a
radical Socialist. I'm now a radical Tory. It has been a very painful
journey."

He was born Kenneth Griffiths (he later dropped the "s") at Tenby,
Pembrokeshire, on October 12 1921. From infancy he was brought up by his
paternal grandparents after his mother and father separated. As a small boy
he fell under the spell of preachers at the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel
which he attended three times every Sunday.

"My grandparents were Victorians with Victorian values," he recalled, "and
anything decent about me I owe to my non-conformist Protestant upbringing."
At the age of eight he acknowledged two passions in his life: Ireland and
Empire. "I overheard a strange whispered conversation in our darkened
kitchen; Flynn, a neighbour, had been a member of the Royal Irish
Constabulary, and was forced to leave Ireland when the roof of his house was
burnt over him. I longed to understand why."

At grammar school, young Ken was "useless" academically, although he did
take the advice of his headmaster to drop the "s" from his name because it
was an Anglicisation. His greatest pleasure came from reading plays and
acting. "I found a great release in escaping from what I was to being
Hamlet. I loved it. I seemed to have a built-in sense of how to behave on
stage - it's instinctive and mysterious."

After taking a job at a Cambridge ironmonger's, he approached the Festival
Theatre for work, and at the age of 16 was cast as Cinna the Poet in a
modern-dress version of Julius Caesar. Other stage work followed at Brighton
and Tenby, including a part as the young psychopath in Night Must Fall. In
1938 Griffith's West End debut came with a small part in Thomas Dekker's
Shoemaker's Holiday. Two years later he played a backward Borstal youth in
Reginald Beckwith's Boys in Brown.

Having served in the RAF in the Second World War, he joined the exiled Old
Vic company in Lancashire which was run by Tyrone Guthrie, whom Griffith
described as "the greatest creative force in drama". He went on to play
several parts with the Old Vic - including Oberon in A Midsummer Night's
Dream - and appeared in Marlowe's Tamburlaine with Donald Wolfit. His last
West End appearance was as the forthright defence lawyer in Terence
Rattigan's last stage play, Cause Célèbre (Her Majesty's, 1977).

Griffith's first film role was playing a sadist in the popular thriller The
Shop At Sly Corner (1947). He went on to play comedy roles in the Boulting
Brothers' Private's Progress (1956) and Lucky Jim (1957). Generally,
however, his characters were unsympathetic: he was a union agitator in I'm
All Right Jack (1959); a wireless operator in A Night to Remember (1958); a
Soho denizen in Expresso Bongo (1959); a circus boss in Circus of Horrors
(1960); and a sinister mercenary in The Wild Geese (1978). In small parts he
often rose above negligible scripts, but not all his roles were minor ones.
John Fernald cast him as Raskolnikov on television in Dostoevsky's Crime and
Punishment, a role which Griffith repeated at the Arts Theatre, London, in
1954. Later he was cast as a mad old man in Four Weddings and A Funeral
(1994) and played a wily old cleric in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But
Came Down A Mountain (1995).

In the 1960s Griffith's critical attitude towards what remained of the
British empire was jolted during a visit to South Africa with the Old Vic.
In 1967 he made a film for the BBC about the Boer War in which he savaged
British imperialism and expressed sympathy for the Boers and the British
private soldiers who died in the conflict.

Subsequent films included The Public's Right To Know (broadcast in 1974 in
protest at the suppression of the film on Michael Collins); Sons of the
Blood (a further analysis of the Boer War, broadcast in 1972), and Curious
Journey (about the Easter rebellion and the Anglo-Irish War). He also made
biographical documentaries about figures ranging from Napoleon, Thomas Paine
and Roger Casement to Clive of India and Pandit Nehru. He published several
books, including Thank God We Kept the Flag Flying (1974) and an
autobiography, The Fool's Pardon (1994).

Kenneth Griffith always maintained that his behaviour in life was governed
by the idea that he should have few regrets when the time came for death.
"When I think deeply about this," he said in 2000, "I end up feeling that my
life has not been in vain. I've done something that I believe is right, even
though in trying so hard I have encountered some very rough weather."

All three of his marriages were dissolved. He is survived by three sons and
two daughters.

julian_craster

Obituary: Kenneth Griffith

Radical film-maker whose splenetic manner undermined his effectiveness

Dennis Barker
Tuesday June 27, 2006
The Guardian

While Laurence Olivier was still alive, the radical film-maker and actor
Kenneth Griffith declared that it was obscene that Olivier could be paid a
thousand times more for a performance than some other actors - because he
could not possibly be worth it. In similar vein, while Lord (Lew) Grade was
still alive, Griffith, in his Who's Who entry, accused the entertainment
baron of "suppressing" his sympathetic documentary about the Irish
republican leader Michael Collins at the behest of the "cowardly bastards"
of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who thought that Hang Out Your
Brightest Colours, which he had made for Grade's ATV, could inflame passions
in Northern Ireland.

Griffith, who has died aged 84, thought nothing of kicking that sort of sand
into the faces of the eminent and powerful. As a result, he was never a
comfortable figure as an actor or film-maker, and those who appeared on chat
shows with him had to have strong nerves. Arguably, his anti-establishment
stance might have been more successful had he learned to ration his
splenetic tongue. Television executives brave enough to commission his
(later, often banned) work maintained that his trouble was that he could not
shut up.
Of course, the downside of the resentfully small, unprepossessing,
self-consciously Welsh working-class Griffith had its rich upside as well.
It showed itself in his acting, and in his re-enacted history films -
usually with him playing all the leading roles. Though he did not look like
Hitler, and was politically opposed to anything that smelt of
authoritarianism, he was one of the very few actors who plausibly portrayed
the Nazi leader. This was in the 1950s film The Two-Headed Spy, with the
then bit-player Michael Caine playing one of his aides. The manic
concentration - and the unease when faced with the reality of other people
and their views - were aspects Griffith was well able to convey. In his own
films, he also portrayed Napoleon - a hero who should have beaten
Wellington - Cecil Rhodes and Edmund Kean, as well as Collins.

Singlemindedness was a factor in Griffith's work, his heroes and his three
marriages. But he was never a gramophone for predictable leftwing opinions:
his view of the Afrikaners in South Africa, normally regarded as more harsh
to the blacks than were the whites of British descent, was provokingly
sympathetic - he thought the Brit element more hypocritical - and led to
South African television pulling the plugs on the project. He also ran into
trouble when he proposed to shoot some of his film about Lord Baden-Powell,
the founder of the Boy Scout movement, in South Africa - from the film
technicians' union, the ACTT, which objected to its members working under
the apartheid regime. And he resented the epidemic of strikes in the 1970s
because they made Britain "a laughing stock".

Griffith grew up in hard circumstances. He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire,
abandoned six months later by his immature parents, and brought up by his
father's parents. His grandfather was a stonemason and poor. Surprisingly,
Griffith was never bitter in public about his parents, and chose to be with
his father when he died. But the wounds showed in oblique ways.

He went to local council and grammar schools, and was intensely lonely; he
often contemplated suicide but was jollied out of it by his English teacher,
Evelyn Ward, who encouraged his flair for language and self-projection. In
1937, he became an actor at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, served in the
RAF during the second world war and then joined the Old Vic, where he
perfected the sort of idiosyncratic, often sinister, sometimes comic
portrayals that later made him a reliable supporting actor in many
distinguished British films.

But the period of his life that interested and gratified him most (perhaps
because it was, by far, the most controversial and acrimonious) was from
1964 when David Attenborough, then head of BBC2, asked Griffith to make a
film about the siege of Ladysmith, about which he had expressed views.
Griffith protested he had never made a film, and knew nothing about how to
do it. Attenborough took a daring attitude and told him he would pay for him
to learn. Soon Griffith was working for ITV, the BBC and television
companies abroad, producing some of the most controversial historical films
ever made, giving full reign to his belief in widespread conspiracies and
cover-ups.

Several of these productions stayed on the library shelf because those who
had commissioned them got cold feet. The 1973 Michael Collins film was
followed two years later by the Baden-Powell reverse. Blocked on two fronts,
Griffith counter-attacked on a third, making a film for Thames Television
about this double suppression, called The Public's Right to Know. It, too,
was shelved.

At the beginning of the 1980s, undefeated, Griffith made a film called
Curious Journey, in which nine IRA veterans talked to camera about their
part in the 1916 Easter Rising. He was allowed to buy the film back, as long
as he did not mention who had commissioned it (it was the Welsh company,
HTV). He once even accused the anti-censorship group, Index, of censoring
him when there was a delay in publishing two book reviews he wrote for its
magazine.

In his boyhood Griffith had been a scrum-half at rugby, which may have
helped. Even late in life, he loved to support the Welsh side, wrapped in
his enormous rugger scarf - an enthusiastic, impossibly idealistic,
explosive student who never wanted to age into conformity but always wanted
to challenge and provoke. He was divorced three times and had five children.


Kenneth Griffith, actor and film-maker, born October 12 1921; died June 25
2006

David Brent

Two of my favourite film performances from Kenneth Griffith were in 'I'm All Right Jack' (1959) and 'Privates Progress' (1956). Not surprisingly both of his characters featured in those films were named Dai.
He starred in many underplayed comedy roles that enhanced many a film.
A sad passing.

Dave.

DB7

He appears a bag of contradictions; pro-IRA and pro-Boer, a documentary filmmaker who was polemic rather than objective, apparently turned down a role in Patriot Games because of it's simplistic view of the IRA but accepted a role in the jingoistic Who Dares Wins. Went by his Imdb page earlier and it looks like there's been a few tasteless comments left.

bartonbank

One of my most enjoyable memories of TV as a teenager was "The Perils of Pendragon"...as someone well versed in Welsh village life it was remarkably realistic!!
I have never seen the series repeated not on video or DVD unfortunately

John Clive

I'm new to Britmovie and I don't think I have much space here to write all the things I would like to about Kenneth. We first met on location in Wales when we started recording a one off drama/comedy called A Persistent Coffin. It was written by Peter Draper and gave Kenneth and I a wonderfully devious and conspiratorial relationship. He owned the village shop, and I was his nephew, Rosko. I always called him Uncle, and he responded with a faintly disparaging..."Rosks..." Never the full Rosko.
As Rosko of course, I pretended I didn't mind. I was after the shop.

Well the one off play went on to become a series of six fifty minute episodes under the title of Perils of Pendragon. More importantly we got to know each other very well. His suspicions about me not being a real Welshman, soon evaporated and over the subsequent years we got to be very good friends.

I've probably already outstayed my welcome, suffice to say I felt a very real sense of loss when I learned that Ken had gone..."Don't worry Uncle, I'll look after the shop - and I'll always keep your name above it....Rosks..."