ATWI... INTERVIEW SERIES
You may recognize his face from any number of roles he has played over the years. He hasn’t really changed much. He has always been portly, to put it kindly, with a kind, youthful face, but a demeanor that seems to inflate his age and experience. If you were asked to conjure up a generic image of a star actor, it probably is safe to say it would not look very much like Richard Griffiths. But, at the age of 59, and in his fifth decade in show business, it is getting harder and harder to deny that this notorious ‘character actor,' given his dream role, has become just that. During an exclusive interview with Griffiths late last month, we discussed his latest film, The History Boys, in which he reprises his role from the theater that brought him a Tony earlier this year. And, at least as interestingly, we discussed the unlikely journey that brought Griffiths out of a “hellish” youth in Northeast England and, against all odds, to great success.
Griffiths was born in a working class neighborhood to parents who “were deaf and dumb,” or, in more politically-correct terms, simply deaf. His parents’ impairment made for a lonely childhood, and the limited relations he did have with them were often acrimonious. One thing he and his father shared in common was for the movies. “My dad used to work away from home, and he’d be away for up to two months of a stretch working out in the country,” Griffith reminisces. “And then he’d come home and, eventually, he’d sit down and tell us about movies that he’d been to see, you know? And, of course, because he was deaf and dumb, he never ever heard the dialogue. So, God knows, his understanding of a movie was based entirely on the pictures he could see, you know?”
The English state school system experienced a drastic shortage of teachers when the Baby Boomer generation came of age. Griffiths, for one, still mourns the fact that he and his contemporaries were underserved in their education, through which he “just chugged along,” he says. “I came out of it with an ability to do mental arithmetic, and I could speak the language fairly well, but I had a thick northern accent and I was pig-ignorant about almost everything.” Though his interest in many subjects would lead him to become a self-taught intellectual in later years, he dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, partly to escape the classroom, and partly to supplement the family income.
Griffiths found honest work as a porter, but one day his employer pulled him aside to offer some advice. He told Griffiths he was too smart for the job and that he should leave, get some qualifications, and then come back to a management position that would be waiting. Griffiths went home and, after some sparring, convinced his father to send him to secondary school. When he arrived, he already possessed a deep passion and talent for painting, and signed up for an art course. After just six weeks of classes, the professor pulled him aside for a talk. He need not come to art class any longer, he was told, as he already was qualified to go to art school, and should proceed accordingly.
Again, after coaxing his father for support, he applied to institutions throughout England and was accepted almost everywhere. When with instructors and other students he met to discuss his work, however, he was told that the sort of paintings he did were “very traditional and old-fashioned,” and not what art students of the day were or should be focusing on. Griffiths was dismayed that his “generation was basically sitting around in the studios painting rainbows on twigs.” When he expressed a desire to “paint things that look like things,” he was told those days were over. He remembers someone saying, “Single-lens reflex camera, one-frame, thirty-five mil—crash! That’s Rembrandt. You’re never going to get better than that, so forget it. There’s no point in trying to paint it. Nobody will pay you for it.” Crushed, he “just lost the will to live, as far as painting was concerned,” and had to lick his wounds in the midst of “a terrible situation” back home. He had “gone to war with my dad, he’d almost cut me off and thrown me out the house, and I’d wasted years of time trying to become a painter, and it just didn’t look like it was gonna happen. So I had to cast around for an alternative.”
He knew one thing for certain. He did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps in the construction business. He had tried that briefly, developed calluses on his hand, and he did not like them. As he recalls, “I didn’t fancy the thought of doing this for the next, you know, lifetime. So I looked around. I wanted something that was easy on the hands and that I could do without too much sweat, you know? So I thought, ‘I know what I’ll do! I’ll teach!’ Because teaching seemed pretty easy to me—as a student, what teachers do looks really simple.” Further seduced by the prospect of a regular wage, easy hours, and long holidays, he decided to teach drama and English. And that, he says, is how he ended up becoming an actor, adding, “I never did teach.” All of this makes it more than a little ironic that the role for which Griffiths probably will be remembered is that of a teacher.
Back in early 2004, Griffiths received a package from Nicholas Hytner, the director of London’s National Theatre. It contained an early version of a script for The History Boys and a note asking “What do you think?” Griffiths immediately read the script and concluded it was “a formless mass that needed lots of shaping,” but was immediately drawn to the “fantastic” lead role of Hector, a teacher at an upper-class private school that is a launching pad for top-quality students.
Set in the Thatcher-era, The History Boys presents two teachers—Hector and Irwin—whose educational approaches are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Hector represents a rare and dying form of idealism; he tells his students that when it comes to history, “all knowledge is precious,” and they should “take it, feel it, and pass it on,” rather than just being able to quote it on demand without grasping its deeper meaning. Irwin, on the other hand, essentially teaches them how to do well on tests. In a results-oriented society in which the ultimate measure of success is admission to Oxford or Cambridge, whose ideology will prevail? This is the wheel around which The History Boys turns.
Griffiths was drawn to “the universality” of his role, he says, but I think it resonated with him on a much more personal level, as well. When asked to discuss what about Hector interested him, he becomes more serious, and his response (almost a soliloquy) could just as easily be referring to himself as his character—someone with a “compendious knowledge of literature and an enormous sense of English cultural life, and tradition, and history, coupled with what I took to be an extremely wise view of the world, based on a lifetime of disappointment, and pain, and suffering that was all private, and internal, and never revealed on the surface, because he never took it out on anybody, and he never went ‘round with a chip on his shoulder, and he never begrudged anybody anything.”
Griffiths could be forgiven if he has a bit of a ‘chip on his shoulder,’ although there is no indication that he does. Much of his life has been difficult, and the fact that he managed to overcome so many obstacles is a testament to no one but his own resilience. Aside from the sense of isolation that he experienced growing with disabled parents in a poor neighborhood and poorer school system, he has faced additional adversity because of his physique, which is grounded in genetics more than anything else. “It’s a kind of constant war you fight with the system,” he acknowledges. “Our system’s dysfunctional, so it’s always been a problem, since I was a teenager.” Sighing, he adds, “It’s something you just have to cope with. It obviously affects casting. And it’s been very difficult.”
When Griffiths first went to the theater, he was already eighteen years old. “I couldn’t believe it,” he remembers. “It was a gobsmacking thing.” The movies were a more frequent—but no less thrilling—excursion for him. He recalls, “Going to the movies was always a big deal. Just getting out of the house was a big deal, you know, because it was kind of difficult. We lived a few miles away from the movie house, and we didn’t have a car, so it was always buses and stuff. So the whole thing became a big event, you know? You had to go out, get dressed, get the bus, go into the town, go into the movies, get the ticket, see the movie… it was a whole evening gone, you know? And it was just wonderful stuff.”
Of his experiences at the movies, Griffiths remembers joyfully “screaming and yelling at Flash Gordon, and Roy Rogers, and stuff like that.” As he got a little older, he says, he could never quite grasp the appeal of Marilyn Monroe, who “didn’t make me embarrass myself.” Unlike most, he preferred Jane Russell, Monroe’s partner in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or as Griffiths remembers her, “the dark lady with the big mazumbas," adding, "She was fantastic! I mean, she did more for my libido than, you know, any amount of Viagra!”
One actor who particularly impressed Griffiths was Edward G. Robinson, who he regarded as “an amazing presence in those movies.” He felt that Robinson, who often played hard-boiled character, “was always disturbing,” adding, “he seemed to me so ugly, you know? I used to think, here’s this little dumpy guy, and he’s crabby, and he’s always sort of doing sour-masked characters. But he was mesmeric, you know? He was a great actor.” Again, this does not sound unlike the actor Griffiths himself has become.
Why, in the end, does Griffith believe The History Boys actually matters? Because, he argues, even though the film is set in the 1980s, the problems it addresses—namely those of how we educate young people, in England and abroad—remain relevant and unresolved. Speaking of the British system, Griffiths laments, “It’s just churning. It’s not actually producing proper people.”
When Hytner first broached the idea of adapting the play into a movie, Griffiths was opposed to the idea. In fact, he says, “I’ve always been kind of a naysayer on it.” But when the production’s one-year engagement at the National Theatre ended in the Spring of 2005, Hytner realized that they would never again be able to reassemble the cast, and made known his desire to have it captured permanently on film. While several major studios expressed a deep interest in backing the project, Hytner shied away from most big-budget offers, because he was not willing to negotiate changes with the cast to make the film more commercially marketable, reports Griffiths.
Is Griffiths happy with the adaptation? “Uh,” he pauses, before candidly continuing, “yes and no.” He says “it’s very truthful to the show, and it’s very honest, and everything.” His main gripe is the lack of time they had on the production, for which many scenes were slightly changed, and a few others were added or extracted from the play. He is confident, however, that none of the passion that defines the debate in The History Boys was lost in translation. “Don’t forget,” he urges, “in the theater we played five hundred full houses eventually. Broadway is very unforgiving if you’re just taking it easy with yourself. They let you know. And the last performance on Broadway, I remember saying to the guys, ‘This is the last time we’ll do this. These people paid the same money they did on the opening night and the Tony night, so they deserve not just the same show, but probably the best show.’ And everybody was cool about that.”
With anything involving Richard Griffiths, it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll get your money’s worth. He is an actor’s actor, not that he minds the money, fame, or recognition that comes with being a good one. But even Griffiths, who is one of the most talkative interview subjects I have ever encountered, seems at a loss for words when the O-word is dropped… Oscar, that is. This year, for a change, Griffiths, even more than his film, has been the focus of awards buzz. (It doesn’t hurt that he also co-stars in another of the better films of 2006, Venus, alongside Peter O’Toole.) If the buzz turns out to be baseless, it will be nothing new or particularly crushing to Griffiths, who went through his entire career without much recognition until the role in The History Boys came along. And if it does not? “What it would mean,” Griffiths almost whispers, “is something I haven’t even begun to contemplate. But it would be marvelous.” Just under two months from now, Richard Griffiths might just make some history of his own.
