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Paul Ritter, versatile actor best known as the eccentric dad in Friday Night Dinner – obituary
Besides his role as the outrageous Martin Goodman, he excelled as an engineer in the drama Chernobyl and played John Major on stage
Paul Ritter, who has died of a brain tumour aged 54, took his acting talents from Kent to Broadway and, courtesy of the Harry Potter films, the silver screen, but he was best known for playing the outrageous patriarch Martin Goodman in the hit sitcom Friday Night Dinner.
While hosting weekly family get-togethers, hard-of-hearing Martin – usually minus shirt – would slug back tomato ketchup straight from the bottle or ramekin, grab toast from the bin and describe the meal in front of him as “a lovely bit of squirrel”.
He would often sneeze over it – and everyone – while his catchphrase, on hurting himself, was: “Oh, s--t on it!”
Ritter and Tamsin Greig, as Martin’s wife, Jackie, played the north London Jewish couple welcoming their twentysomething sons, musician Adam (Simon Bird) and estate agent Jonny (Tom Rosenthal), to a traditional Friday-evening Shabbat dinner. On their arrival, he would greet them as “bambinos” before they entered what threatened to be a family battleground.
Once, Martin had to explain why Jackie regarded him as being unfaithful. “I dreamt I was in a bath of milk with Lady Di,” he told them.
The brothers saw the weekly event as useful in feeding them but annoying for having to put up with their embarrassing parents, particularly their father’s cringeworthy jokes.
The sharply written scripts over six series (2011-2020) reflected the secular Jewish upbringing of the programme’s creator, Robert Popper, whose own father once met the sitcom’s star. “He did actually come up to me with a science book and ask me if I was interested in Uranus,” said Ritter.
Before Friday Night Dinner, Ritter was familiar to film fans in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) as the vampire-loving writer Eldred Worple, desperate to write a biography of the schoolboy hero. The actor – at 5ft 11in, with no glasses – was remarkably different from the “small, stout and bespectacled” character featured in JK Rowling’s book.
On stage, he received a Tony Award nomination when he appeared at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre in a 2009 Old Vic company revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests trilogy. The New York Times praised his portrayal of “passive, clownish” Reg, the laidback estate agent.
He was born Simon Paul Adams on December 20 1966 in Dartford, Kent, to Jean (née Mooney), a school secretary, and Ken Adams, a toolmaker at power stations. On leaving Gravesend Grammar School, he read modern languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, then spent a year at the German National Theatre, in Hamburg.
Living in the country influenced his choice of Ritter as a stage name on his return to Britain, when he discovered that there was already an actor called Simon Adams. His acting talent was recognised early in his career when, in 1994, The Stage remarked on him “trebling up” as the map-maker Mercator, the botanist Humboldt and a pregnant settler, alongside James Nesbitt as a wisecracking Jesus, in Snoo Wilson’s play Darwin’s Flood at the Bush Theatre, London.
After seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon (1996) and London (1997), Ritter acted with Peter Hall’s company at the Old Vic Theatre and found a home with the National Theatre for several years (2000-2002) in roles that included Karl Marx in Tom Stoppard’s trilogy Coast of Utopia.
He played the former prime minister John Major in Peter Morgan’s play The Audience at the Gielgud Theatre in 2013 alongside Helen Mirren as the Queen. Three years later, he attracted good reviews in an Old Vic revival of Yasmina Reza’s three-hander Art, bringing tension to the role of Marc, horrified by his smug friend Serge (played by Rufus Sewell) spending £100,000 on a blank canvas.
In 2007, 15 years after making his television debut in The Bill, Ritter landed his first regular role, in the comedy-drama City Lights, as the gangster Scott Sweeney, trying to stop brothers played by Robson Green and Mark Benton shopping him to the police.
When he played a farm hand in the final series of the daytime drama Land Girls (2011), he was again alongside Benton, in the role of the farmer.
He also took roles as real-life stars in two TV biopics – the comedian Eric Sykes in Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This (2014) and the comedy writer Jimmy Perry in We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story (2015).
Ritter’s first quirky TV character was Dr Billy Cartwright, the irreverent forensic pathologist in the first three series (2011-13) of the crime drama Vera. His odd behaviour included hiding car magazines in the ceiling of his office.
He played another forensics expert in the Paul Abbott-written police series No Offence (2015-18) when he was seen as the eccentric Randolph Miller. Although frequently hung over, the maverick kept his job because he was so good at it.
In contrast, Ritter brought fear to a role when he played Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief engineer of the nuclear reactor, in the 2019 HBO-Sky series Chernobyl. The actor described his character as “a terrible workplace bully”.
His other television roles included the ambitious civil servant Bobby Waterhouse in the Cold War spy thriller The Game (2014); Werner Leinhard, a Swiss company’s chief executive officer, in the improvised comedy Hang Ups (2018), starring Stephen Mangan as a troubled therapist offering webcam sessions; and General Ormonde Winter, Dublin Castle’s chief of intelligence, in the Irish War of Independence drama Resistance (2019).
On the big screen he played Guy Haines, a special adviser to the British prime minister, in the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace.
Following his first marriage to Michele Barber, Paul Ritter married Polly Radcliffe in 1996. She and their two sons survive him.
Paul Ritter, born December 20 1966, died April 5 2021