The British actor – star of friday Night Dinner, Harry Potter and much more – has died aged 54

The death has been announced of actor Paul Ritter, who succumbed to a brain tumour this week aged just 54. Ritter was the brilliantly versatile actor who played eccentric dad, Martin Goodman, in the most perfect of sitcoms, Robert Popper’s Friday Night Dinner. The setup is that every Friday evening the two Goodman sons, musician Adam (Simon Bird) and his younger brother, estate agent Jonny (Tom Rosenthal), return to the family home for the eponymous family meal.

The lads spend the evening jockeying for position and joshing each other at the table and the brilliance of Popper’s conceit is the delicacy and understatement of the Jewishness. It’s there in the warmth of Tamsin Greig’s mum Jackie Goodman and the way she basks in the glow of having her family around that Friday Night Dinner table – but the only real clue is the discreet challah loaf on a board behind the family – it’s not necessarily even on the table. And although Popper himself is Jewish, the only Jewish actors in the cast are Rosenthal and, more occasionally, the splendid Tracy-Ann Oberman as expansive extrovert Auntie Val. The only non-Jewish character featuring regularly is wonderfully creepy next-door neighbour Jim (terrific Mark Heap), invariably accompanied by his Alsatian Wilson, their cameo appearances heralded by an unwelcome ring at the front door.

It is the utter daftness of the situations Popper dreams up for the family that makes each 28-minute episode a glittering gem. And it was pretty nearly always Ritter‘s Martin who was at the epicentre of the mayhem and mess – up in the loft, down in the shed, in the under-stairs cupboard, up a tree, on the drive in an ancient wheel-less caravan that’s going nowhere… He usually appeared shirtless (apparently like Popper’s father, on whom he loosely based Martin).

It is hard – impossible – to imagine Friday Night Dinner without Ritter. But it is of course just one of an extraordinary range of roles played by this fine, versatile actor and “deeply clever, funny, intelligent, kind man” (Popper).

Ritter starred in award-winning TV drama Chernobyl and has played key roles in both the Harry Potter and James Bond movies. On stage he was Olivier-nominated for Coram Boy at the National Theatre, London, Helen Edmundson's musical play for children based on Jamila Gavin’s novel; and for a Tony on Broadway for Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests. He also starred in Art, the hit play by French Jewish playwright Yasmin Reza, at London’s Old Vic in 2016.

But it is perhaps especially touching, and fitting, that his latest role, in the radio adaptation of Anne Youngson’s moving, elegiac bestseller Meet Me at the Museum, was again opposite Greig, in a serialisation that ended only last week on BBC Radio 4.

By Judi Herman

Stream all six series Friday Night Dinner on All 4 and listen to Meet Me at the Museum on BBC Sounds (episode one available until 20 Apr).