Career
In 1937 he left school and moved to Cambridge, taking a job at an ironmonger's weighing nails. This lasted only a day and proved to be the only job he ever had outside of the acting world. He approached the Cambridge Festival Theatre for work, and at the age of 16 was cast by Peter Hoare as Cinna the Poet in a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar. He became a regular jobbing repertory actor, making his West End theatre debut in 1938 with a small part in Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday.
Griffith volunteered for service with the Royal Air Force in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. Before training in Canada, he returned to see his grandparents in Tenby, who at his request gave him a leather-bound copy of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf; he later explained in an interview that he wanted to understand what he was fighting against. While training in Canada, he caught scarlet fever, which resulted in his taking up stamp collecting. The first stamp he collected was the Siege of Ladysmith, South Africa.
In 1941, he made his debut in the first of more than 100 films in which he principally played character roles. Released from the air arm of the Royal Air Force, Griffith returned to London, from where he was invalided out of the RAF in 1942.
He joined the Liverpool, Lancashire-relocated Old Vic, and in repertory. On return from a tour of South Africa (during which he visited Ladysmith), he met his great friend and fellow Celt Peter O'Toole.
He appeared in many British films between the 1940s and 1980s, notably as Archie Fellows in The Shop at Sly Corner, Jenkins in Only Two Can Play (1962), the wireless operator Jack Phillips on board the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), in the crime caper Track the Man Down (1955), and especially in the comedies of the Boulting brothers, including Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). He also portrayed the gay medic Witty in The Wild Geese (1978) and a whimsical mechanic in The Sea Wolves (1980).
His work on the 1960s TV programme The Prisoner is much appreciated by its fans, because of his appearances in the episodes The Girl Who Was Death and Fall Out. He has appeared in episodes of Minder, Lovejoy and critically acclaimed performances in "War and Peace", "The Perils of Pendragon", Clochemerle and "The Bus to Bosworth", where his personification of a Welsh schoolteacher out on a field trip won him many accolades back in his homeland of Wales. More recent cinemagoers may have seen him as the "mad old man" in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), as Reverend Jones in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995), and as the Minister in Very Annie Mary (2001)
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)