Actors - Kenneth Griffith

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	Actors - Kenneth Griffith

Kenneth Griffith (sometimes credited as Kenneth Griffiths) is a character actor and documentary film-maker, born on October 12, 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). 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 1973 Griffith made a documentary film about the Irish military and political leader Michael Collins called 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. 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 a thrice-married Protestant and a veteran of World War Two, he became a supporter of Irish republicanism and named his home in Islington, London "Michael Collins House"; he proudly displays on his wall a death threat from Northern Irish loyalists, and he also has a bust of Collins on display in the living room. Though he supports Irish nationalism, he does not appear to take much interest in Welsh nationalism or the Welsh language.

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, and 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, a sufferer from Parkinson's Disease.

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