Kenneth Griffith

While Laurence Olivier was still alive, the radical film-maker and actor Kenneth Griffith declared that it was obscene that Olivier could be paid a thousand times more for a performance than some other actors - because he could not possibly be worth it. In similar vein, while Lord (Lew) Grade was still alive, Griffith, in his Who's Who entry, accused the entertainment baron of "suppressing" his sympathetic documentary about the Irish republican leader Michael Collins at the behest of the "cowardly bastards" of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who thought that Hang Out Your Brightest Colours, which he had made for Grade's ATV, could inflame passions in Northern Ireland.

Griffith, who has died aged 84, thought nothing of kicking that sort of sand into the faces of the eminent and powerful. As a result, he was never a comfortable figure as an actor or film-maker, and those who appeared on chat shows with him had to have strong nerves. Arguably, his anti-establishment stance might have been more successful had he learned to ration his splenetic tongue. Television executives brave enough to commission his (later, often banned) work maintained that his trouble was that he could not shut up.

Of course, the downside of the resentfully small, unprepossessing, self-consciously Welsh working-class Griffith had its rich upside as well. It showed itself in his acting, and in his re-enacted history films - usually with him playing all the leading roles. Though he did not look like Hitler, and was politically opposed to anything that smelt of authoritarianism, he was one of the very few actors who plausibly portrayed the Nazi leader. This was in the 1950s film The Two-Headed Spy, with the then bit-player Michael Caine playing one of his aides. The manic concentration - and the unease when faced with the reality of other people and their views - were aspects Griffith was well able to convey. In his own films, he also portrayed Napoleon - a hero who should have beaten Wellington - Cecil Rhodes and Edmund Kean, as well as Collins.

Singlemindedness was a factor in Griffith's work, his heroes and his three marriages. But he was never a gramophone for predictable leftwing opinions: his view of the Afrikaners in South Africa, normally regarded as more harsh to the blacks than were the whites of British descent, was provokingly sympathetic - he thought the Brit element more hypocritical - and led to South African television pulling the plugs on the project. He also ran into trouble when he proposed to shoot some of his film about Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, in South Africa - from the film technicians' union, the ACTT, which objected to its members working under the apartheid regime. And he resented the epidemic of strikes in the 1970s because they made Britain "a laughing stock".

Griffith grew up in hard circumstances. He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, abandoned six months later by his immature parents, and brought up by his father's parents. His grandfather was a stonemason and poor. Surprisingly, Griffith was never bitter in public about his parents, and chose to be with his father when he died. But the wounds showed in oblique ways.

He went to local council and grammar schools, and was intensely lonely; he often contemplated suicide but was jollied out of it by his English teacher, Evelyn Ward, who encouraged his flair for language and self-projection. In 1937, he became an actor at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, served in the RAF during the second world war and then joined the Old Vic, where he perfected the sort of idiosyncratic, often sinister, sometimes comic portrayals that later made him a reliable supporting actor in many distinguished British films.

But the period of his life that interested and gratified him most (perhaps because it was, by far, the most controversial and acrimonious) was from 1964 when David Attenborough, then head of BBC2, asked Griffith to make a film about the siege of Ladysmith, about which he had expressed views. Griffith protested he had never made a film, and knew nothing about how to do it. Attenborough took a daring attitude and told him he would pay for him to learn. Soon Griffith was working for ITV, the BBC and television companies abroad, producing some of the most controversial historical films ever made, giving full reign to his belief in widespread conspiracies and cover-ups.

Several of these productions stayed on the library shelf because those who had commissioned them got cold feet. The 1973 Michael Collins film was followed two years later by the Baden-Powell reverse. Blocked on two fronts, Griffith counter-attacked on a third, making a film for Thames Television about this double suppression, called The Public's Right to Know. It, too, was shelved.

At the beginning of the 1980s, undefeated, Griffith made a film called Curious Journey, in which nine IRA veterans talked to camera about their part in the 1916 Easter Rising. He was allowed to buy the film back, as long as he did not mention who had commissioned it (it was the Welsh company, HTV). He once even accused the anti-censorship group, Index, of censoring him when there was a delay in publishing two book reviews he wrote for its magazine.

In his boyhood Griffith had been a scrum-half at rugby, which may have helped. Even late in life, he loved to support the Welsh side, wrapped in his enormous rugger scarf - an enthusiastic, impossibly idealistic, explosive student who never wanted to age into conformity but always wanted to challenge and provoke. He was divorced three times and had five children.

· Kenneth Griffith, actor and film-maker, born October 12 1921; died June 25 2006

• Film
• obituaries

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9pbWiipaN8c4OOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0es6boK2tkae2pr%2BQ