Last modified on Wed 7 Apr 2021 13.07 EDT
The brilliant character actor Paul Ritter, who has died of a brain tumour aged 54, came to the notice of wide audiences only later in his career – as the long-haired wizard and would-be biographer Eldred Worple in the sixth of the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009); as the villainous power plant worker Anatoly Dyatlov in the chilling HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl (2019); and, from 2011 onwards, as the combustible, inexplicably shirtless Martin Goodman in Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner (“lovely bit of squirrel,” moving fork to mouth) with Tamsin Greig.
In all three roles he was never recognisable as whoever he really was. For Ritter was an actor who “disappeared” inside his character. He always seemed to be patiently volcanic and, on the other hand, anonymously scrofulous. When he was on stage – and he appeared often with the RSC and the National Theatre, especially – I tried, and failed, to pin down his identity. I settled for what he might really look like as the bespectacled wreck of an unsuccessful pianist in a 2005 revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party: the lone inmate of a boarding house in a resort where his father had once “nearly” come down to see him play in a concert. But that was probably just another ruse.