A bank clerk until his mid-twenties, Welsh-born Hugh Griffith switched to acting in 1939, appearing in his first film, Neutral Port, in 1940. The outgoing, hooknosed, frequently bearded Griffith hit his stride in the postwar years with a series of highly distinctive character parts; most of these, notably the "prologue beggar" in The Beggar's Opera (1953), made up in exuberance what they lacked in screen time. In 1959, he won an Academy Award for his marvelous portrayal of horse-loving Sheik Ilderim in Ben-Hur; four years later, he earned a second nomination for his work as the gloriously slovenly Squire Western in Tom Jones (1963). Other notable roles in the Hugh Griffith canon included Audrey Hepburn's larcenous father in How to Steal a Million (1967), the gimlet-eyed magistrate in Oliver! (1968), the eternally out-of-touch King Louis XVI in Start the Revolution Without Me (1969), Caiaphas in The Passover Plot (1973), and two different characterizations in Vincent Price's brace of Dr. Phibes horror films.