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Colin Welland (left) accepted his Oscar for best screenplay from author Jerzy Kosinski
Oscar-winning writer and actor Colin Welland has died aged 81 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, his family has announced.
Welland won an Oscar in 1982 for best original screenplay for writing the film Chariots of Fire, about two athletes at the 1924 Olympic Games.
He famously used his acceptance speech to declare: “The British are coming.”
As an actor, he won a Bafta for playing the sympathetic English teacher Mr Farthing in Ken Loach’s Kes in 1969.
Welland started his TV acting career in Z Cars in the 1960s
He had found fame earlier that decade when he played PC David Graham in TV police serial Z Cars.
He went on to successfully combine acting and writing, and scooped a Bafta TV Award for writing TV plays in 1971. That year, he also won the Bafta film award for best supporting actor for Kes.
His film writing credits also included 1979’s Yanks, which starred Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Gere, and 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime.
As an actor, he played a vicar in Dustin Hoffman’s 1971 thriller Straw Dogs and appeared in both the TV series and the big screen version of crime drama The Sweeney.
Also on TV, he was an overgrown schoolboy in Dennis Potter’s 1979 play Blue Remembered Hills and appeared with Rory Kinnear in 1980s sitcom Cowboys, about incompetent builders.
Welland wrote the screenplay for Chariots of Fire
Welland, from Liverpool, said his father initially curbed his childhood ambition to act, urging him to become an art teacher instead.
Welland taught in Leigh, Lancashire, before finally pursuing his ambition to act at the age of 26.
“I was going to get married and I thought, if I get married I will lose my opportunities, because responsibilities follow marriage,” he said.
His first theatre job was playing the lead in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party Manchester’s Library Theatre.
He then had a three-week stint as a BBC newsreader before joining Z Cars. After three years in Z Cars, he returned to the stage as an actor and writer.
Welland (left) starred in Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills
Most of his own plays were set in the north of England and “usually champion the individual against the system”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1973.
“I usually find that it’s one man’s effort to break through what is usually expected of an individual.”
After the success of Chariots of Fire, he tried to make a film titled Rocket about George and Robert Stephenson, the father and son who developed rail travel.
“I took Rocket to America immediately after Chariots of Fire had come out,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2001.
“‘We want another Chariots of Fire,’ I was told. ‘It is another Chariots of Fire,’ I said. ‘Men against the establishment.
“‘Robert Stephenson couldn’t read and write, yet he was the greatest engineer of his generation. He had the world against him, yet he fought through. It is another Chariots of Fire.’ But they wanted another film about runners.”
In a statement released via his literary agent Anthony Jones on Tuesday, his family said: “Colin will be desperately missed by his family and friends.
“Alzheimer’s is a cruel illness and there have been difficult times but in the end Colin died peacefully in his sleep.
“We are proud of Colin’s many achievements during his life but most of all he will be missed as a loving and generous friend, husband, father and granddad.”
Welland, who died on Monday, is survived by his wife Patricia, four children and six grandchildren.
BBC