He could go down in ‘History’ as a winner

Nothing could please Richard Griffiths more than the way Alan Bennett’s teddibly, teddibly English drama “The History Boys” has seduced Broadway. Just don’t ask him about the Tony Award, which he’s likely to win on Sunday for his performance as Hector, the wildly unorthodox teacher who’s preparing his students as much for the maddening unpredictability of life as for the rigors of Oxford and Cambridge.

“I won’t even mention the T-word,” he says, lounging in the library salon of his hotel. “Though I’ve already won a couple of awards in America for the part, I’ve been warned that there are all sorts of plots and subplots and that I’m really going to have to brace myself this time.”

Griffiths shares Hector’s poetics of heartbreak, which is just one reason the role of the lonely, beleaguered pedagogue seems tailor-made for him. He also has a similar high-flown eloquence that can be circumlocutory in the extreme when he doesn’t want to answer a question. And as for his tough disciplinarian streak -- well, a particularly boisterous Broadway audience found out the hard way.

After an outbreak of ringing cellphones during a Wednesday matinee, Griffiths stopped the show and announced: “OK, I am not going to compete with these electronic devices. You were told to turn them off by the stage manager; you were told it was against the law. If we hear one more phone go off, we’ll quit this performance. You have been warned.”

This was not the first time Griffiths has chastised audience members for this annoyance. (According to his count, it’s the third.) But thankfully on this occasion he didn’t have to expel the guilty party himself, as he did last fall in London (to a standing ovation, no less) after a woman’s mobile went off three times.

A self-made man, Griffiths doesn’t have much tolerance for slouching of any kind. He was born to deaf-mute parents and left school at 15 only to return years later to struggle his way through the English system toward a college education. He describes his journey as “slow, delayed and painful” and says that he’s had trouble handling disappointment throughout his career.

“In 1979, I missed something big and was astonished at how upset I was,” he says. “It was 25 years ago, and since then I was never in the frame. I was nominated for a couple of things, but I had it in my mind that somebody else was bound to get it, which, of course, they did. And then, suddenly, ‘The History Boys’ erupted. I don’t know how to describe it. Crescendo is the musical term. It’s like a cornucopia -- goodies of nature keep tumbling out. You just wonder how long this thing can last.”

Though he is recognized mostly as abusive Uncle Vernon in the “Harry Potter” movies (a professional windfall that finances much of his theater work), “The History Boys” has turned Griffiths from a dependable character actor into a bona fide theater star. A Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus, he’s long had the respect of his peers; now he’s had it confirmed not just on the West End (where he’s won everything worth winning for playing Hector) but also in the flash and fizz of the Great White Way.

Come October, when the film of “The History Boys” is scheduled to be released, this confluence of critical and commercial success has the chance to reach a new level.

For a man of his girth, this is quite an accomplishment. Griffiths is heavy -- probably one of the heaviest dramatic actors to grace Broadway since Kathy Bates in her fabulous 1980s fat days. (Come to think of it, he could give Harvey Fierstein and Nathan Lane a run for their sandwiches.) As he dryly acknowledges, his “ridiculous shape and size limits the casting potential.”

Dressed in an untucked, yellow, short-sleeve button-down shirt and gray slacks, Griffiths makes a dashingly cherubic appearance, especially with his rosy cheeks and tousled crest of white hair. He definitely doesn’t look like a man pushing 60. He’s large -- no getting around that -- but if it weren’t for the ornate cane he depends on, it wouldn’t seem noteworthy.

The bigness of his acting talent ultimately eclipses all other considerations. What director wouldn’t want to draw on his theatrical truth? He says that playwright David Hare thinks he “plays wisdom,” while director Jonathan Kent says he’s a “romantic lead in hiding.”

He takes pride in the fact that he’s one of the last actors trained by former Royal Shakespeare Company chief Trevor Nunn. “I went from carrying a boat hook -- not even a spear! -- and by the time I finished at Stratford, I was playing kings,” he says.

The word commonly used to describe him is “avuncular,” which makes sense given his “Harry Potter” fame. Parents should be careful, however, not to ask him to prove to their children that he really is Vernon. He won’t take kindly to the expectation that he should act for free, though every time he makes this point he can’t help being wryly amused at the way he’s transformed himself into the character.

Griffiths made a lasting impression (in Britain, anyway) portraying another uncle -- Monty, in “Withnail & I,” the 1987 cult comedy in which he impersonated a randy homosexual aesthete -- and became an unwitting gay icon in the process. Needless to say, the irony isn’t lost on a man so fiercely private he refuses to utter a word about his wife.

“The History Boys” finds him once again preying on younger men. Well, “preying” might be too strong a word for what Hector is eventually caught doing to a couple of his 18-year-old students while giving them a lift on his motorcycle. (In his diaries, Bennett describes a similar experience he had as a teenager being “ineffectually touched up” by a teacher, which seems to be the extent of the offense.)

Griffiths admits to not fully understanding the sexuality of his character. He says he asked Bennett (with whom he’d had a “chilly relationship” for having backed out of the playwright’s 1986 farce “Kafka’s Dick”) to explain what Hector was getting out of the deal: “Alan told me not to be concerned about gratification, but I said the audience will certainly be even if you’re not.”

Remarkably, after having been showered with accolades for the part, Griffiths is still grappling with his choices. He talks at length about an epiphany he recently had onstage, in which he says he understood that the cause of Hector’s eventual emotional meltdown has nothing to do with his guilt over groping the boys.

“Hector suddenly sees the students as callow opportunists,” he says. “The despair he feels stems from the fact he thinks he’s failed to secretly educate them into an understanding that history and literature aren’t merely a strategy for advancement.”

Griffiths says he has tried to impress upon the young cast members a sense of the opportunity they’ve been given and the need to keep digging deeper into the layers of meaning. “As long as they live, this will be their yardstick play,” he says. “And let me say that the learning curve they’ve demonstrated in terms of stagecraft has been extraordinary.”

As for himself, he says he has “unfinished business” and would especially love the opportunity to do some Chekhov as well as a little more Pirandello, whom he says he has a special fondness for. But most of all he hopes that his newfound success has helped him get “the monkey of disappointment off my back.”

“After all the ballyhoo in London,” he says, “I suddenly realized the truth of Kipling’s ‘If.’ ” Hector-like, he summons the lines with a clarity won out of hard experience: “If you can meet with triumph and defeat/And treat those impostors just the same....”