Richard Griffiths

Withnail And I: How a Beatle-funded comedy about alcoholic actors became a cult classic

The boozy British comedy classic was produced by Beatle George Harrison and made stars out of Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, but its initial cinema release went almost unnoticed. Nick Duerden looks at the film's chequered road to cult status.

Withnail and I: Cult classic turns 30

Charting the travails of two out-of-work actors in the dying days of the 1960s, British film comedy Withnail and I has staggered to its 30th birthday. Star Richard E Grant looks back at its filming and considers whether anyone else could have tackled the role that put him on the road to Hollywood. Chin chin!

Withnail & I: 10 reasons why it's the best UK comedy

Withnail and I is a melancholic masterpiece and one of the funniest British films ever made.

A sordid, supremely funny trudge through the pathetic lives of two destitute actors - Paul McGann's Marwood and the languidly furious Withnail (Richard E Grant) - who survive on drugs and drink in grotty Camden Town, then head unwisely for the rural idyll of Uncle Monty's (Richard Griffiths) freezing country cottage. A glory of British cinematic comedy.

Alan Bennett's hugely popular play about Sheffield schoolboys aiming for Oxbridge gets a respectful big-screen treatment from Hytner, using the original cast and letting the wise and witty words do the work. The lovely Richard Griffiths's idealistic, repressed gay history teacher is the biggest act among many astute performances.

Episodes shouldn't, perhaps, work. The tale of a husband-wife writing team (Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) who are persuaded, with a refreshing lack of reluctance, to sell out and take their fictionally Bafta-winning (and very British) comedy to Hollywood, thence to have it "made over" with gleeful disregard for such restrictive critical concerns as, for instance, taste - is surely too close to the experiences of many homegrown authors and film-makers for the memories to be anything other than vile at best. The Greig/Mangan original comedy, for instance, fictionally starred Richard Griffiths as a tweedy teacher in his twilight: transposed, the writers are both starstruck and horrified to find the grinsome Matt LeBlanc, Joey from Friends, in his place.

But it does work - and how. Partly through the subtlety of the writing, by Jeffrey Klarik and his partner David Crane, also of Friends fame: Friends, of course, wasn't written with British audiences in mind, but might as well have been, and its appreciation of "our" sense of humour (and our preconceptions about how the Americans could never quite "do" it) meant it became a crossover dream. As Episodes is now proving: it's been garnering much critical praise over there. Partly, too, thanks to the chemistry between Greig, Mangan and Matt LeBlanc, who's playing a lightly fictionalised version of "Matt LeBlanc" - kindly, vainglorious, deeply shallow to the extent that he has drunkenly invited his crazed stalker into his bed.

And one of the simple delights lies in seeing how far Tamsin Greig has come, from stoic work as Debbie Aldridge in The Archers, to a revelatory gift for comedy as Fran in the sublime Black Books, to - ta-dah! - sunny La-La-Land: Toto, we're not in Ambridge any more. This is just telly that makes you smile. Incidentally, one of the gags involves Matt, arrested on a borderline DUI charge, to be met with a beaming desk-sergeant who proudly boasts that his sister was nurse No 4 or something in one Friends episode. Matt does his winning best to pretend to remember her. (He's still booked.) On Good Morning Britain the other day, Matt popped up, only to have Ben Shephard remind him that he, Ben, had once "played" an interviewer in one Friends episode. Matt did his winning best to pretend to remember him. A trouper.

Late, great-girthed actor Richard Griffiths, aka Withnail & I's Uncle Monty, heads up the original stage cast in this screen adaptation of Alan Bennett's award-winning theatre comedy. Griffiths is Hector, an inspirational general studies teacher at a 1980s boys' grammar school with a reputation for unorthodox teaching methods - not least his penchant for fondling the pupils he offers rides home on his moped. To the boys (including a young Dominic Cooper and James Corden), Hector is an avuncular joke and their favourite teacher - until along comes Stephen Campbell Moore's Irwin to help them with the Oxbridge entrance exams. Think a sharper, British version of Dead Poets Society, realised with deadpan wit.

Jack Whitehall on his godfather, Richard Griffiths

Comedian Jack Whitehall pays tribute to the much-loved actor Richard Griffiths - his godfather and a man he could always trust for sound advice.

Richard Griffiths by James Corden: goodbye Rizzo

The first time I met Richard Griffiths I was standing in the vast space of rehearsal room 2 at the National Theatre and about to begin my first day as a History Boy.