Hugh Griffith Welsh Greats

Hugh Griffith was one of the finest character actors of his generation.

His striking features, his roguish humour, and sheer talent

won him the greatest prize in his profession.

I don't put on an act.

That was me transformed into somebody else.

But the passionate nature that made him so captivating on screen would ultimately be his undoing.

Hugh Emrys Griffith was born

in the quiet Welsh-speaking hamlet of Marianglas in Anglesey in 1912.

His mother, Mary, had already been married twice to sea captains who had both drowned.

Hugh's father was her third husband, William Griffiths,

known locally as "Will of all voices"

for his talents as an impressionist.

Hugh recalled his childhood in Marianglas in the notes for his unfinished memoir.

"I remember a glorious August day

"when we children were playing around the trees and large shrubs in the garden

"of Angorfa, where I was born.

"My mother and father were lounging on the large stone steps.

"You couldn't have imagined a more perfect summer's day."

As a very young child,

Hugh showed he was a good mimic,

and he was a little mischief.

We both found ourselves in detention, practically every day.

I can't imagine why, because we never did anything wrong,

there must have been a vendetta against us, I think.

When we'd been in detention for about three minutes,

Hugh would turn around to me and whisper, "Watch out, I'm going to have a fit."

He'd act very agitated.

And eventually put his head down on the desk,

and finally fall flat on the floor in a faint.

And the poor teacher,

faced with this other Oscar-winning performance,

would say to me, "Williams, pick him up and take him home."

Which I did, and we were both free, of course.

And our detention only lasted about four minutes.

It was at the village hall, known as the British School,

that Hugh first saw professional actors perform.

These were touring players from South Wales who put on productions like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

On the night of the show,

Hugh was paid a penny to stay backstage and unroll the backcloth.

He made his own stage debut in the chapel pantomime, playing the back end of a cow.

Hugh was a bright lad, but at school there was one subject he struggled with.

My father got fed up with me failing English all the time,

so I couldn't get into the University of Wales,

having failed English.

So I got into the bank.

I never passed an exam in English.

At the age of 17, Hugh started work at the National Provincial Bank.

He spent the next nine years as a bank clerk, first in North Wales, then in London.

A grounding in banking comes in very useful

for an actor.

But I'm not expected to know anything,

actors are not expected to know anything about finance

and contracts and things like that, but I keep an eye on myself.

By day, Hugh was a clerk at the bank's head office in Bishopsgate,

but in the evenings, he acted in amateur productions.

I joined the St Pancras People's Theatre,

which was a converted chapel

way up towards Camden Town, and we did one play a week.

From there I got to know about the scholarship to go to the Academy.

At the age of 26, Hugh applied for a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Competition was fierce, but Hugh beat 300 other applicants to win the Leverhulme scholarship.

My mother and elder brother naturally

were rather worried

because he was leaving a safe job to...to join RADA.

Everybody said you would be

earning 1,000 a year in the bank before you earn it on the stage.

That remains to be seen.

Even the general manager of the bank called me in

the day I gave in my resignation.

He said, "You know I can't accept this.

"You've got to give six months' notice."

I said, "That's a pity, I'm starting on Monday at the academy."

During his year at RADA, Hugh won the coveted Bancroft Gold Medal

for his role as Napoleon in a play by George Bernard Shaw.

The playwright himself praised Hugh's performance.

The critic for the Times called him an imaginative and powerful actor.

After graduation, Hugh did some early work for television.

I did television

before the war in Alexandra Palace.

The lights were so strong everybody's clothes were bleached.

This shirt would be white by the time we'd finished,

the lamps were so strong.

It was now 1939 and world events were about to make a decisive impact on Hugh's career.

We shall fight on beaches,

landing ramps,

in fields, in streets,

and on the hills.

I struggled with my conscience.

Should, or should I not, fight in some way for England, Wales, or Britain?

Why fight for anything?

In the end, Hugh enlisted with the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Before he was posted abroad, he married Flora Britton, an actress he'd met at RADA.

Hugh was keen to start a family, but it wasn't to be.

My wife flatly refused to conceive, whereas the agreed object of the wedding was for me to leave

something to remember me by, believing sincerely as I did that I'd never come back alive.

Hugh was posted to India.

He reached the rank of captain and, at one point, found himself in charge of the garrison

where the sole prisoner was Pandit Nehru, who would one day become the country's first prime minister.

Hugh survived the war, but it proved a serious setback to his career.

As soon as I started professionally, there were six-and-a-half years of war.

I was in India and Burma, places like that,

and there was no thought of acting.

I missed the best years of my life at that time,

otherwise I'd have been at the Old Vic or somewhere.

When Hugh returned home after four years of separation from his wife, she left him.

Now, aged 34, and struggling to restart his career,

he bumped into another actress at the Wyndham Theatre.

She was behind some sort of bar with a lot of paper sheets on the counter, busily arranging papers,

in order that chaps like myself

could at least rehearse something together, little scenes out of known plays.

And then perform them in front of some well-chosen theatrical agents

who might, or might not, get us back into the business.

Seeing her properly alone and coming forward

to me from behind that counter, I knew I'd fallen in love with her.

Her name was Gunde Margaret Beatrice.

One hell of a mouthful to say at the wedding.

Hugh and Gunde were married in 1947.

By now, Hugh was beginning to make a name for himself in the theatre.

During a season at Stratford, he played Mephistopheles, opposite Richard Harris's Dr Faustus.

He also appeared as King Lear in the Swansea Festival.

In 1949, his film career hit its stride

when he appeared in Emlyn Williams' film, The Last Days Of Dolwyn.

Hugh played a minister who opposes a scheme to flood the village of Dolwyn.

There are two ways of telling the truth.

Nobody knows that better than a man who wears his collar back to front.

Mr Davies has offered you money, homes and work, that is true.

But, it is also true, my friends,

that your consent is being sought for the village of Dolwyn to be drowned.

You are free to choose.

The drowning will be fulfilled by the waters crawling with

the feet of 1,000 serpents down the road you have just walked,

under the doors, into the houses, in the windows, up the stairs,

over the roofs, over the nests of birds into the chimneys, over the chimneys.

Dolwyn will be drowned.

That same year, Hugh made the first of many appearances as a comic character actor for Ealing Studios.

In A Run For Your Money, he played a Welsh harpist down on his luck in London.

What's wrong with my nose, little man?

Nothing's wrong. It's just appropriate.

This nose can smell the primrose in the spring or a mutton-chop cooking

or the well-brushed hair of children in the park.

It is filled with the savours of innocence and memory.

The moss under the waterfalls,

a little girl under the haystack, the cowslips in the railway cutting.

It can smell out the corruption in a den of hypocrites, scoundrels

and dead souls.

Hugh provided great comic value on screen,

but on stage, he remained a serious actor.

In 1951 he returned to Stratford to play Owain Glyndwr, opposite Richard Burton.

He and Burton shared a house together.

On weekends it was the scene of riotous parties

attended by Charles Laughton, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Within a couple of years, Hugh had a country house of his own

near Stratford, paid for by his increasingly frequent work in film and TV.

I joined your father as a mathematical genius.

That's not boasting. I was, once.

A calculating boy.

With these machines, they beat me.

I pressed buttons.

Why did you join him?

A kind of duty, I suppose, the mathematical kind.

The idea of making roads in space for rockets to travel,

four-dimensional roads, curved with relativity, metal with best-quality continuum.

In 1957, Hugh landed a major part in a Broadway production, Look Homeward, Angel.

During the run of the play, Richard Burton was also in New York, starring in Time Remembered.

We went to see Richard in the afternoon.

There he was, an 18th century figure, with a little badge.

When we looked, we saw what the badge was - it was a daffodil.

It was St David's Day and he'd put it on.

We went to see Hugh in the evening.

Then he comes in.

The eyes blazing.

I looked in absolute surprise

at what he had on his lapel.

It was not a little

badge of a flower, a daffodil, but he had a complete leek.

Roots and all.

During the run of Look Homeward, Angel, Hollywood director William Wyler,

turned up one night and sat in the front row.

After the show, Wyler asked Hugh if he'd audition for the part of an Arab horse trader in his next movie.

Billed as the greatest spectacle ever filmed,

this biblical epic was so big it threatened to bankrupt MGM.

Hugh brought a larger than life comic presence to the role of Sheik Ilderim.

During filming, he struck up a close friendship with the star of the picture, Charlton Heston.

The supporting actor is always a tough field.

There are always a lot of good performances

and the Sheik was a marvellous role.

Hugh's performance was extraordinary.

Believe me, my friend, it is a great advantage of many wives.

-Some day I hope to have one.

-One wife?! One god, that I can understand.

But one wife, that is not civilised.

It is not generous.

HE BELCHES

Was the food not to your liking?

Indeed.

HE BELCHES

Thank you, thank you.

And take my advice, my friend, buy yourself some wives.

And now I must say good night to my beauties.

When they are ready for sleep, they get impatient and jealous.

They wait to see which one I will embrace.

I will make my farewells, then.

No, no, no, stay. Stay and see them.

Hugh's performance earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

He considered attending the award ceremony in Los Angeles,

but decided against it on the basis that he probably wouldn't win.

The morning after the awards he was woken by a phone call

from his sister, Ellen, telling him he'd won an Oscar.

The BBC visited Hugh and Gunde at their home in the Cotswolds to take a look at the award.

Ah, now, there's my wife arriving with a pack of Pembrokeshire corgis.

Here we are, here's my wife.

-How do you do?

-How do you do?

That's an amazing pack you've got!

-They're rather fun.

-How many have you altogether?

I think about 30.

I don't count seriously.

-What's this one called?

-This one is Melys.

Melys.

They've all got Welsh names, have they?

Nearly all Welsh names, yes, from the champion down.

Well, you've got quite a bit of land here, Hugh.

Yes, there's about an acre of orchard altogether, with the stream running through it.

-All these fields here, they're yours, too?

-Yes.

There's about 12 and a half acres.

Doesn't the house look lovely from here?

It does, doesn't it?

I must congratulate you on your Oscar.

Thank you, I only got it last night.

-You'd better come in and see it.

-Oh, yes.

Yes.

Here it is.

A bit heavy. You ought to have two to make a pair of dumbbells, I think.

"The Academy's first award to Hugh Griffith in recognition of his performance in Ben Hur."

I always remember him consciously smoking, you know?

Always having fags. And every time he lit a fag it was with a match.

And he'd get a match from the matchbox and then reach out

and bring in the Oscar for Ben Hur, Best Supporting Actor.

You know the shape of the Oscar?

Round the back of the Oscar, the naked man, he'd strike the match up the...

Light up the fag. A lovely little touch of how to use an Oscar, you know?

Hugh was now a hot property in Hollywood.

When MGM decided to make Mutiny On The Bounty,

the celebrated British director in charge of the project approached Hugh.

Sir Carol Reed was directing it and he asked me to play the part

of this man who tells the story that goes right through from beginning to end.

Filming took place on the idyllic island of Tahiti, but there was soon trouble in paradise.

The production degenerated into a power struggle between Carol Reed

and the star of the picture, Marlon Brando.

Crew and cast split into two camps,

with British actors Trevor Howard, Richard Harris and Hugh on one side

and Brando and the other Americans on the other.

Eventually, things came to a head.

Carol Reed was fired. Then I said, "Well, if he goes, I go."

And they said, "Well, you can't go."

"It'll cost you so much if you want to go."

So I had to carry on with it and go back to Tahiti and find a way to fire myself.

-And did you?

-Yes.

Hugh dug in his heels and refused to act, claiming he was ill.

"April 25th, 1961.

"Dear Mr Griffith, we are taking steps today in England

"to terminate our contract for your services because of your repeated failure to perform.

"Very truly yours, JJ Cohn.

"Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer."

Having got himself fired from the Bounty, Hugh began to worry

that he'd damaged his professional reputation in the process.

His self-confidence as an actor suffered.

He only regained it following a colourful performance

as Squire Weston in the film version of Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones.

It earned Hugh his second Oscar nomination.

When renowned producer Peter Hall staged Henry IV at Stratford in 1964

there was only one man he wanted to play Falstaff.

How did your Falstaff compare with, say, that of Orson Welles or any of the others?

Far better!

-I thought it might be.

-Oh, God!

He was British,

but Celtic, because he was always Celtic.

Very sexy, very roguish, rather devilish,

with a wonderful command of language and a wonderful wit.

I would certainly rate it among the greatest performances.

On his night he was superb.

Hugh brought the same earthy charm to Galton and Simpson's 1972 comedy

about French provincial life, Clochemerle.

Christen it properly!

Come on, show us you're a true Clochemerlian.

This is not the sort of thing one can do to order!

Bravo, sir!

Wait a minute.

Hah! He-he!

It's on its way!

It's coming.

Here it is!

THEY PLAY LA MARSEILLAISE

But the television drama for which Hugh would be best remembered was a Welsh one.

In 1977, screenwriter Gwenlyn Parry and producer John Hefin

had a film they wanted Hugh to appear in.

They made a pilgrimage to his house, bearing a fine bottle of Armagnac

and eventually persuaded Hugh to sign up for Grand Slam.

Dewi Pws was one of Hugh's co-stars.

The first day... He used to call me a name which I can repeat,

but it was a term of endearment, apparently, so he told me.

"Come here you little..." This word. I thought, "Yes."

I had my copy of my script all scrunched up in my back pocket

and he had this big attache case with locks on it.

I thought, "Well, he wants to go over the script now." So righto.

"Come round the corner here." I went round this corner,

and this is about 7.30am, 7.45am in the morning.

"Oh, right, he's very professional."

"Right, sit down." "Yes, Mr Griffith."

"Right!" He opened this attache case.

I thought, "Here it comes." And it was full of drink!

Brandies and mixers and everything.

"What will you have now, then?"

And you couldn't say no, so I said, "Whatever you are having, Mr Griffith."

"We'll make it a large." So at 7.30am in the morning on the first morning we were drinking.

I was nearly ill!

Drink, sir?

Yes, a large brandy and soda, if you please. Medicine.

I'm sorry, sir, they're all miniatures.

Well, give me half a dozen minis and a Babycham for my friend here.

He was dangerous. I mean, there was no question knowing what to do next.

He was mercurial, unconventional.

Never would he look as if he'd lost a line or had gone somewhere else.

He would have that look of total confidence on his face,

no matter what he'd said or where he'd moved to.

Look! It's the Eiffel Tower!

Filming on location in Paris on match day,

the cast and crew were banking on a Welsh victory to give them their big ending.

But the Wales XV let them down.

After filming, the cast drowned their sorrows in a hotel bar

with the help of an old friend from back home.

Brains SA, they'd imported especially,

and that was going over each other's heads.

Nobody could move, virtually. It's all happening.

Everybody was a bit down and drunk and on the floor and pot plants and everything. It was a bit of a mess.

And the Welsh team were over there, I can still see them now,

about six or seven of them over there, quite morose.

And Hugh got up, and he wasn't a tall man, either. They all noticed.

And he was the man, you see? The man who'd got the Oscar.

Everybody turned and there he came.

He had his big hat on his head and his collar

and his stick and his cane and he clumped all the way across.

And he knew everybody was looking at him, he was a clever boy.

Out he came, he came to the middle of the minstrels' gallery

and he thumped this to get everyone's attention, as if everyone wasn't riveted on him.

And he pointed his stick towards the team down there.

And we'd had just lost.

He looked down and he said, "You're all bastards!"

And there was a great cheer!

Everybody collapsed, including the Welsh team, and it lifted the whole night.

"Oh, we don't care if we lost."

Grand Slam was a great success, but Hugh was in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.

Having played comical drunks all his life,

his own reputation as a hard drinker was by now notorious.

-Oh, no, I don't go chasing after girls and all that sort of thing.

-You don't?

Or a lecherous old man, or a dirty old man as I'm often cast, you know?

-You've played some lecherous parts.

-Oh, yes. I know what it's all about.

I ought to at my age, oughtn't I?

And not just the girls, of course, there's the drinking and high living as well.

Not the boys, no!

What did you say, the drinking and the high living?

Well, the drinking to a certain extent, yes. And high living, yes.

My wife does the cooking, which is excellent, and that's high living.

I remember when he came on the set, the first few days,

the rumour went round, "Oh, he's drinking, he's drinking."

"Get his wife. What are we going to do? He's drinking, he's drinking."

And the producer walked over to him and said, "Hugh?" "Yes?"

He said, "I hear you're drinking."

He looked at him.

And he said, "If you go on drinking, you'll be replaced."

And he went, "Righto."

And he never drink again.

The films Hugh acted in during his later years

were an uninspiring assortment of horror movies and sex comedies,

but he still harboured one great unfulfilled ambition,

to play King Lear at Stratford.

I think by the time that he was ready,

he was actually probably not quite fit enough to do it.

The part and the time didn't come together at the right moment.

I think drink softened his mental and physical muscles, and that was sad.

Hugh Griffith died on 14th May 1980, aged 67.

On the day of Hugh's death, his old friend Richard Burton paid tribute to him.

'Not only the greatest actor that Wales has produced,

'but at his finest,

'one of the greatest in the world.

'Unique unto himself, with a stage presence

'that was almost animal in its intensity.'