Stratford Johns

Alan Edgar Stratford Johns, actor: born Pietermaritzburg, South Africa 22 February 1925; married 1955 Nanette Ryder (one son, three daughters); died Heveningham, Suffolk 29 January 2002.

News: 'Softly, Softly' star Johns dies, aged 77

More than any other fictional character, Charlie Barlow revolutionised the image of the British police on screen. In the groundbreaking 1960s series Z Cars, the heavyweight detective inspector, played by Stratford Johns, was a bully who used verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse while interrogating suspects. Even hardened criminals found the psychopathic policeman intimidating.

Johns made the character his own. He recalled:

I was annoyed that the police had always been portrayed as pipe-smoking bunglers who occasionally stumbled over a corpse. I was bored with it. I had two lines as a detective in a Rod Steiger film, Across the Bridge, in which I was supposed to indicate that I wasn't overpowered by Steiger. I brought a little reality into it, did a rather bad-tempered act. It got a good reaction.

So I tried it on Z Cars. The producer said, "Why are you doing it like that?" I said, "Barlow went home last night, had a row with his wife, got out of bed, went downstairs and drank half a bottle of Scotch, sitting on his own. He went back to bed and got up with a hangover." They liked it and bad-tempered Barlow was born.

The programme, created by Troy Kennedy Martin and set in a fictional Liverpool suburb, was an immediate success and in sharp contrast to the cosiness of the BBC's other police drama, Dixon of Dock Green. The abrasive Barlow was Z Cars' most popular character and, rising to the rank of detective chief superintendent, was also featured in four spin-off series over 10 years.

Johns's own life began in 1925 in South Africa, where he acted in amateur theatre while studying to be an accountant. Deciding to make a career out of acting, he moved to Britain in April 1948 and spent five years with a theatre company in Southend.

He then landed film roles, often as unsavoury types, in pictures such as Burnt Evidence (1954), the Ealing Studios classic comedy The Ladykillers (as a security guard, 1955), the Second World War gunboat drama The Ship That Died of Shame (starring Richard Attenborough, 1955), Benny Hill's first film, Who Done It? (as a policeman, 1955), the Scotland Yard thriller The Long Arm (again as a policeman, 1956) and The Young Ones (starring Cliff Richard, 1961).

His career took a dramatic change when he landed the role of Detective Inspector Charlie Barlow in Z Cars (1962-65). The action switched between the fictional old port of Seaport (based on Liverpool's Seaforth) and the new housing estates of Newtown. Kennedy Martin, along with the producer, David Rose, script editor, John Hopkins, and other writers, who included Allan Prior and Robert Barr, gave the series a hard edge.

The first episode, broadcast on 5 January 1962, opened with Barlow and Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor) standing by the grave of a colleague killed in the course of duty. The pair smoked cigarettes and talked cynically about the chances of their friend's murderer hanging for his crime. On their way back to the police station, Barlow told Watt that they were to head a new crime division with mobile police officers. As their team, they picked constables Bob Steele (Jeremy Kemp), Bert Lynch (James Ellis), Fancy Smith (Brian Blessed) and Jock Weir (Joseph Brady). These characters quickly became television legends, as Z Cars attracted up to 14 million viewers.

So popular were Barlow and Watt that they were given their own series, Softly Softly (1966-70). Leaving Newtown, the pair – promoted to detective chief superintendent and detective inspector respectively – joined a regional crime squad, Wyvern, near Bristol. The programme was retitled Softly Softly: task force (1970-71) when Barlow was made Head of Thamesford Constabulary CID and supervising officer of the constabulary's task force, assisted by Watt and Detective Sergeant Hawkins (Norman Bowler). Barlow was seconded to the Home Office in both Barlow at Large (1971, 1973) and Barlow (1974-75). In these series, Johns was seen in the world of diplomacy and political intrigue, and in foreign locations.

Interestingly, Johns and Frank Windsor reprised their famous screen roles in Jack the Ripper (1973), a six-part, dramatised account of a reinvestigation of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, and Second Verdict (1976), which looked into six other crimes of the past.

Johns's subsequent television roles included Piso in I Claudius (1976), a green, power-mad frog in Doctor Who (1981), Lord Rothermere in Winston Churchill – the Wilderness Years (1981), Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations (1981), the Home Secretary in the mini- series The Secret Agent (1992) and the headmaster A.B. Noon in The Life and Times of Henry Pratt (1992).

Johns was the original Daddy Warbucks in the West End production of Annie (Victoria Palace Theatre, 1978), a role for which he shaved his head. He also played The Ghost of Christmas Present in the world premiere of Scrooge (Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham).

In his private life, Johns experienced turbulent times. His son Alan was jailed for six months in 1983 for smuggling morphine; and six years later served another drug-related jail term. Johns revealed that the first court case had brought him back together with his actress wife Nanette Ryder – the daughter of another veteran actor, Morris Parsons, who played Wilf Harvey in Crossroads – after they had split up.

But in 1988 she had Johns arrested for assault, although she dropped the charge a day later. In the same year, the couple's son Alan and younger daughter Lissa told a newspaper that they had suffered domestic violence at the hands of their parents. Another daughter, Peta, a theatre company manager, later said: "My parents were fairly volatile but their rows and drinking were blown out of all proportion."

Anthony Hayward