Squire Hugh

He owns a great rural manor and he is undeniably gentry, but he is also a ruddy-faced, curly-haired, country clot. He snores in church, he eats with his fingers. He drinks and drinks and drinks some more from great pewter tank ards; when angered, he absentmindedly dashes beer into the face of a bulldog. He grabs young wenches by the backs of their skirts and topples them onto piles of new-mown hay. He is up to his pointed chin in geese, cattle, ducks, pigs, horses, and a yelping nation of dogs. Mornings, he can be found asleep on the hearth where he passed out, the coals of a great fire still dying beside him, a dog or two nestled in his armpits.

In fact, one can almost smell Squire Western as Hugh Griffith plays him in the brimming and boisterous movie version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. With his huge unsynchronized eyes and a face like a Sheffield hatchet, Griffith embodies magnificently one of Fielding's greatest complements to that category of human character that defies heaven and hell, having a kind of rampantly benevolent diabolism unique to the earth.

All this may have been type casting's finest hour, for 51-year-old Hugh Griffith is a laughing, brawling, roistering Welshman who lives on 13 acres in Warwickshire, where he and his wife raise dogs, hay, a cow and donkeys. For lunch he munches double brandies, and when he does a drunk scene--as in his new movie, The Bargee, in which he plays a lock tender on a canal--he warms up with bolt after bolt of black velvet (champagne and stout). "Did they think I could fake it with bloody tea?" he asks. Almost by obvious right, the short, deep-voiced Griffith will play Falstaff next spring in Royal National Shakespeare Company performances commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

Prurient Hindquarters. At least three-fourths of all actors started as the rear half of a stage cow, but Griffith is the only one who still complains that the front half "stank to high heaven." Also, he brought new dimensions to the role by continually rubbing the cow's hindquarters pruriently against the scenery. He was ultimately trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and he has been in demand ever since, interrupted only by World War II, when he was stationed in Swansea town and became a close drinking friend of Dylan Thomas.

He has always been splendid in movies, from Kind Hearts and Coronets to Ben-Hur, in which he won an Oscar as the mock-sinister Sheik Ilderim, whose fine white horses won the chariot race. He first earned wide recognition on the West End stage as the leering General St. Pe in Anouilh's Waltz of the Toreadors, and on Broadway as Thomas Wolfe's father in Look Homeward, Angel. Last year, doing Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle in London, he nearly deprived the world of his future services when, during the hanging scene, he slipped off the box he was standing on and hanged himself in full view of the audience. After gurgling and turning black, he passed out. The curtain fell. He was cut down by his fellow actors. Coming to, he took a shot of brandy and got on with the show.

Part-Time Harem. His commitment to acting is thorough but not blind. "Acting is a means of doing what I want to do," he says, "which is living a normal life, and not the kind of stupid life most actors lead. I can't imagine not acting, but I'm in a very happy position. I can wait here in the country with the donkeys and the corgis, and pick and choose. I plan to do as I am doing, develop my little property, and have a little harem. Not a full-time harem, of course. That would be troublesome."

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