Kenneth Griffith
Kenneth Griffith (sometimes mistakenly credited as Kenneth Griffiths) is an actor and documentary film-maker, born on 12 October, 1921 in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales.
He can be spotted in many British films between the 1940s and 1980s, notably as the wireless operator Phillips on board the Titanic in A Night to Remember, and especially the comedies of the Boulting brothers, including Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959). He also portrayed Whitey, the homosexual medic in The Wild Geese (1978), though in real life Griffith is heterosexual.
His work on sixties TV programme The Prisoner is much appreciated by its fans, due to his appearances in the episodes The Girl Who was Death and Fall Out. He has appeared in episodes of Minder. More recent cinemagoers may have seen him as a "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).
In midage, Griffith became a supporter of the IRA. In 1973 Griffith made a documentary film about the life and death of Irish military/political leader, Michael Collins entitled Hang out your Brightest Colours (which is a line taken from a letter from George Bernard Shaw to one of Collins' sisters after his death) for ATV.
He also contributed to a documentary interviewing then-surviving (now all deceased) IRA guerrillas from the 1920s: Maire Comerford, Joseph Sweeney, Sean Kavanagh, John O'Sullivan, Brigid Thornton, Sean Harling, Martin Walton, David Nelligan (or Neligan) and Tom Barry, titled Curious Journey.
Griffith's very sympathetic portrayal caused some concern given the state of tension in Northern Ireland and ATV boss Sir Lew Grade decided to withdraw the film, which was not released publicly until 1994. Although the info was removed from IMDb, the story on Griffith and his Irish republican sympathies was published in the 15 November, 1997 edition of the Irish Post (est. 1970) as Beating the censor, written by Martin Doyle.
Although a thrice-married Protestant and a veteran of World War Two, Griffith named his home in Islington, London, "Michael Collins House"; he "proudly" displays on his wall a death threat from the UVF (Northern Irish loyalists) "flanked on one side by a friendlier letter from Gerry Adams". He also has a bust of Collins on display in the living room.
Griffith has made some documentaries which are said to have shown an anti-imperialist stance. He is a supporter of the Boers in South Africa, which is rather surprising, since the Boers became the white apartheid imperialists, who were defeated eventually by the black majority, and, thus, are the polar opposite of the Irish republicans he also claims to support.
He made a BBC2 TV documentary on the teenage runner Zola Budd which purported to reveal injustices done to her by left-wing demonstrators and organisations during a tour of England in the late 1980s.
He accepted an invitation from the far-right Western Goals Institute as guest of honour to their annual dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in London on 24 November, 1989, where he spoke out against non-white Third World immigration into Britain and Europe.
He has been ill in recent years, apparently suffering from Parkinson's disease.
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External links
- [1] BBC article