Paul Ritter

Paul Ritter, born Simon Paul Adams on 20 December 1966 in Gravesend, Kent, was an English stage and screen actor who performed on Broadway in 2009. He died on 5 April 2021 at the age of 54 from a brain tumour, at his home in Faversham, Kent, surrounded by his family.

Ritter grew up in a Catholic household in Kent, the youngest of five children, with four older sisters. His father, Ken Adams, worked as a turner and fitter at various CEGB power stations, while his mother, Joan, née Mooney, was a school secretary. He attended Gravesend Grammar School before reading German and French at St John's College, Cambridge. Following graduation, he trained at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, Germany. Upon returning to the United Kingdom, he registered with the actors' trade union Equity under the surname Ritter, a name of German origin that he chose both because another Simon Adams was already registered with the union and because he admired a German actor who bore that surname.

His Broadway appearance came in 2009 as part of a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy The Norman Conquests, in which he performed across all three constituent plays: Living Together, Table Manners, and Round and Round the Garden. The production earned Ritter a Tony Award nomination, and the ensemble cast received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance in 2009. His co-star in that production was Stephen Mangan, a fellow alumnus of St John's College, Cambridge, with whom he had studied and later worked on multiple occasions over the years.

On the British stage, Ritter played Otis Gardiner in the original Royal National Theatre production of Helen Edmundson's Coram Boy, which ran from 2005 to 2006, earning him an Olivier Award nomination. In 2012 he appeared at the National Theatre in the stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, playing the protagonist's father, and in 2013 he portrayed John Major in the premiere of Peter Morgan's The Audience. He also played the role of Pistol in Henry IV, Part II and Henry V as part of the BBC Two Shakespeare history cycle The Hollow Crown in 2012.

Ritter's film work included Son of Rambow (2007), Quantum of Solace (2008), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), The Eagle (2011), and Nowhere Boy. His final film role was Bentley Purchase in Operation Mincemeat (2021), released posthumously and dedicated to his memory. On television, he appeared in the first three series of the British crime drama Vera (2011–2013) as pathologist Dr. Billy Cartwright, and took a lead role in the BBC One Cold War spy drama The Game in 2014. He played comic actor Eric Sykes in Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This, and appeared in the HBO and Sky Max miniseries Chernobyl (2019) as Anatoly Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer. From 2011 to 2020, he starred as Martin Goodman in the Channel 4 comedy series Friday Night Dinner, a role for which he received a posthumous nomination for Best Male Comedy Performance at the 2021 British Academy Television Awards.

In 1996, Ritter married Polly Radcliffe, a research fellow at King's College London. The couple had two sons, Frank and Noah, and lived in Faversham, Kent.