Colin Welland dead: Chariots of Fire screenwriter dies aged 81

Rumbustious, broad-faced, curly haired and heftily moustached, Colin Welland epitomised the indomitable Northern Brit – plain-speaking and pugnacious.

The Oscar-winning screenwriter, actor and playwright, who has died aged 81, had being suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for some years. But he will be remembered by the Hollywood elite for his combative peak in 1982 when he won the Best Screenplay Oscar for Chariots of Fire, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Hugh Hudson.

After thanking both collaborators (and “British TV – where I learned my craft,”) he said: “I’d like to finish with a word of warning. You may have started something – the British are coming!”

It turned out to be a false dawn for British film-making in the 1980s, but film fans never forgot Welland’s triumphant statue-brandishing.

He was a large, ebullient man who could seem physically gauche (spectacularly so when he and other actors played children in Dennis Potter’s TV drama Blue Remembered Hills) but was capable of great subtlety in writing and acting. In the Chariots of Fire screenplay, he doesn’t show Harold Abrahams winning an Olympic gold medal. The audience aren’t shown the race; they hear the crowd roar and see Abrahams’s coach, Sam Mussabini, punching a hole in his straw boater. In Ken Loach’s film Kes (1969,) Welland played Mr Farthing, a schoolteacher, who in one scene shows a bully just what it’s like to be bullied and, in another, gently teases out of the reclusive urchin Casper (David Bradley) his passion for his pet kestrel. The role won him a Bafta nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Good parts were intermittent, at the start, and between jobs he tried his hand at reading the news. “We decided, the producer and I, to introduce a new element into BBC news-reading,” he wrote later, “Use a Lancashire accent, use colloquialisms. The whole of Cheshire rose in revolt and I was out.”

In the 1960s, he co-starred alongside Brian Blessed in the gritty, long-running police drama series Z Cars, set on Merseyside. But his real interest was writing plays for television: in 1970 alone, three of his dramas were broadcast: Slattery’s Mounted Foot, Say Goodnight to Your Grandma and Roll On Four O’Clock – all set in the North.

“I find Northern people wear their hearts on their sleeves,” he later said about his characters, “are far more communicative, are far more honest and they stimulate me more.”

It was a typical utterance from a multi-talented man whose boisterous enthusiasm endeared him to both audiences and hard-nosed film industry executives.

His wife Patricia and four children told the press yesterday: “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.”