AN INTELLIGENT FORCE (REMEMBERING PAUL RITTER)

 

When news broke of the passing of Paul Ritter on Easter Tuesday, it was deeply felt by those who had come to adore his work.

The Tony and Olivier Award nominated actor dazzled on stage and also on screen as a scene stealing character actor of tremendous range.

He excelled in both drama and comedy and was most cherished for his quirky performance as Martin, the often stripped to the waist father in Channel 4's sitcom 'Friday Night Dinner'.

With his trademark, stressed out catchphrase "Shit on it!", his nerdy scientific obsessions and his disgusting eating habits, Martin Goodman was a brilliant comic creation allowing Ritter free rein to demonstrate his flair for physical and verbal comedy.

His death will be as bitter a blow to fans of the sitcom as Dermot Morgan's was after the completion of 'Fr Ted'.

It's such a blow it's hard to imagine 'Friday Night Dinner' continuing without him.

However Ritter wasn't a one trick pony.

He regularly caught the eye of television viewers in any show he appeared in, whether it was in the BBC2 Cold War thriller 'The Game,' or 'Don't Panic: The Dad's Army Story,' RTE1's Irish War of Independence drama 'Resistance' or HBO's powerful miniseries 'Chernobyl'.

Born in Kent in 1966, he did not court the limelight and had few family connections to showbusiness apart from his mum being a classmate of Bernard Cribbins and his father a classmate of Eric Sykes.

Ritter would later play Sykes in ITV's 2014 TV biopic 'Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This' with David Threlfall and Helen McCrory.

Like a lot of Britain's best actors, he  built his profile through theatre - appearing in productions for the RSC, the Old Vic and the National Theatre and acquiring a reputation as an intelligent performer.

He learnt his screencraft through appearances in TV shows like ITV's 'The Bill,' ITV's thriller 'Instinct' and the Sharon Horgan BBC3 sitcom 'Pulling'.

There were minor roles too in movies like Arnaud Desplechin's 2002 English language debut 'Esther Kahn' with Summer Phoenix and Ian Holm, Laurence Dunmore's 2004 drama 'The Libertine' with Johnny Depp, Samantha Morton and John Malkovich, Gaby Delall's 2005 comedy 'On A Clear Day' with Peter Mullan, Brenda Blethyn and Sean McGinley and Peter Webber's 'Silence of the Lambs' prequel 'Hannibal Rising' with Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li and Rhys Ifans.

There was a memorable role as a geography teacher in Garth Jennings' 2007 comedy 'Son of Rambow' with Will Poulter Bill Milner and Jessica Hynes.

There would also be appearances in Marc Foster's 2008 007 movie 'Quantum of Solace' with Daniel Craig, as the wizard Eldred Worple in David Yates' 2009 fantasy 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' and as John Lennon's headmaster in Sam Taylor Wood's 2009 biopic 'Nowhere Boy' with Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ann Marie Duff, Kristin Scott Thomas and David Threlfall.

However it was his eye catching performances on the West End and Broadway in plays like Helen Edmondson's 'Coram Boy' at the National Theatre which earned him an Olivier Award nomination and Alan Ayckbourn's 'The Norman Conquests' at The Old Vic with Stephen Mangan and Jessica Hynes that secured him a Tony nomination that brought him to the attention of casting agents.

These helped Ritter land the role in 2011 of the hard of hearing Martin, the Goodman family patriarch in the middle class London Jewish sitcom 'Friday Night Dinner' alongside Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird, Tom Rosenthal, Mark Heap and Tracy Ann Oberman.

Over the course of six series, Ritter delighted audiences in one of the best written and best acted farces on television, borrowing some of Martin's mannerisms from his own father.

It spawned other catchphrases like "a lovely bit of squirrel" and his references to his sons' girlfriends as "females".

However Ritter also charmed audiences while Martin engaged in bizarre behaviour like drying fish under the stairs and eating canned meat several years out of date.

He also made an impression as John Werrick in BBC1's three part adaptation of 'Great Expectations' with Douglas Booth, Ray Winstone, Gillian Anderson and David Suchet and joined Channing Tatum, Mark Frost, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Bell in Kevin McDonald's 2011 Roman Britain adventure 'The Eagle'.

In 2012, he drew warm reviews as the father in Simon Stephens' adaptation of 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' at the National Theatre.

On the small screen, he delighted viewers of ITV's detective series 'Vera' with Brenda Blethyn as the irreverent pathologist Dr Billy Cartwright for its first three series.

Ritter guested on the first episode of the shortlived BBC4 sci-fi detective series 'Dirk Gently' in 2013 with Stephen Mangan.

As part of the BBC's 'Hollow Crown' collection of Shakespeare's history plays in 2012, Ritter was cast as the swaggering soldier Ancient Pistol in Richard Eyre's adaptation of 'Henry IV, Part II' with Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Julie Walters, Alun Armstrong, Tom Hiddleston and Michelle Dockery.

A year later, his performance as the Conservative Prime Minister John Major opposite Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth in Peter Morgan's 'The Audience' at the Geilgud Theatre earned him rave reviews.

After appearing in 'Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This,' he stole the show as Bobby Waterhouse, the ambitious head of the counter-espionage branch of MI5 in Toby Whithouse's taut 2014 Cold War spy miniseries 'The Game' on BBC2 with Tom Hughes, Victoria Hamilton, Shaun Dooley and Brian Cox.

Ritter had fun portraying a vicar in BBC1's three part remake of 'Mapp and Lucia' with Miranda Richardson, Anna Chancellor, Steve Pemberton and Mark Gatiss.

There was a role in Saul Dibb's  Second World War romantic drama 'Suite Francaise' with Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sam Riley and Margot Robbie.

He also relished the chance to play another quirky forensic scientist over three series of  Paul Abbott's police comedy drama 'No Offence' with Joanna Scanlan, Elaine Cassidy, Will Mellor and Alexandra Roach.

There was another notable role as King Petedur in BBC's 'The Last Kingdom' with Ian Hart, Eva Birthistle and Nigel Lindsay.

Ritter joined Richard Dormer and John Sessions for the well received BBC2 one-off drama 'We're Doomed: The Dad's Army Story' in which he played Jimmy Perry, one of the sitcom's creators.

He appeared as a screenwriter in Lone Scherfig's  Second World War comedy drama 'Their Finest' with Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston and Richard E Grant.

Ron Howard directed him in another movie franchise 'Inferno' in 2016 - the third film of the 'Da Vinci Code' series - with Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen and Ben Foster.

That year, Ritter joined Rufus Swell and Tim Key in the cast of Yasmina Reza's 'Art' at London's Old Vic.

There was a memorable role in 2017 as a London plumber whose house is mistaken as being the home of the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart by Eddie Marsan's Bob Dylan in Sky Arts' amusing 'Urban Myths' with Katherine Parkinson.

Julian Jarrold directed him alongside Richard Madden, Holliday Grainger, and Richard McCabe in the opening tale of Channel 4's sci-fi anthology 'Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams'.

He had a recurring role in the 2017 revival of ITV's comedy drama 'Cold Feet' with James Nesbitt, Fay Ripley, John Thomson, Hermione Norris and Robert Bathurst and appeared in 2018 in the Channel 4 sitcoms 'Lovesick' with Johnny Flynn, Antonia Thomas and Daniel Ings and 'Hang Ups' with Stephen Mangan, Katherine Parkinson and Fionn O'Shea.

Ritter stole the show in 2019 as a British intelligence chief in Dublin Castle in Colin Teevan's ambitious RTE1 Irish War of Independence drama 'Resistance' with Brian Gleeson, Simone Kirby, David Wilmot, Stanley Townsend, Aoibhinn McGinity, Hugh O'Connor and Craig Parkinson. 

However his finest hour as a screen actor came with his performance as the arrogant deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov in Craig Maxim's superb HBO miniseries 'Chernobyl' with Jared Harris, Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Con O'Neill and Jessie Buckley.

There was another striking performance as a video and audio manipulation expert in BBC1's thriller 'The Capture' with Holliday Grainger,  Callum Turner, Ben Miles, Famke Janssen and Ron Perlman.

2020 saw him pop up as a defence barrister in Amanda Coe's uneven BBC1 miniseries 'The Trial of Christine Keeler' with Sophie Cookson, Ellie Bamber, James Norton, Michael Maloney, Emilia Fox and Ben Miles.

In Julian Fellowes' ITV historical drama 'Belgravia' with Philip Glenister, Tamsin Greig, Alice Eve, Saskia Reeves, Bronagh Gallagher and Tom Wilkinson, he was a butler.

His last screen role was to be as the British physician and barrister Bentley Purchase in John Madden's 'Operation Mincemeat' with Colin Firth, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew MacFadyean Johnny Flynn, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson and Jason Isaacs which Netflix acquired the rights to in February 2021 and is due for release.

Married with two sons, Ritter remained a private and humble man and it was for this reason why the announcement of his death from a brain tumor was so surprising.

What was clear following the announcement was the high regard with which he was held by his co-stars on the stage and onscreen' and by those who never got to work with him.

Eddie Marsan, Tom Rosenthal, Tracy Ann Oberman, Jared Harris, Stephen Mangan, Russell Tovey, Mark Gatiss, Will Mellor, Rob Delaney and Nicola Coughlin all paid tribut.

Rosenthal, in particular, fired off a number of affectionate Tweets about Ritter's generosity, good humour, intelligence and resilience during the filming of 'Friday Night Dinner'.

"Anyone who's seen 'Friday Night Dinner' knows the amount of shit we put him through and I never once heard him complain," the sitcom's star said.

"I'll be forever thankful for working with someone who was so supportive and who taught me so much about professionalism and humility in acting."

Oberman recalled: "Some of the funniest times of my life were working on night shoots with him on 'Friday Night Dinner' shoving a fox in a car or watching him stand on a dustbin trying to get a plastic bag off a tree top.

"He was a true artist and a true mentor.”

One of the nicest tributes, though, came from Robert Popper, the creator of 'Friday Night Dinner' whose show is due to celebrate its tenth anniversary later this year.

"Paul was a wonderful human being. Kind, funny, super caring and the greatest actor I ever worked with," he tweeted.

The stage and screen really are poorer for his passing.

(Paul Ritter passed away at the age of 54 on April 5, 2021)