DENNIS WATERMAN

(24 February 1948 – 8 May 2022)

In 1978, the British actor Dennis Waterman, who has died in Spain aged 74, received the Evening Standard British Film Award for most promising actor - he was all of thirty years old and had been appearing in films and on television since 1959! On 1 May 1959, aged eleven, he was in an episode of ITV's Armchair Theatre series, a play called A Phone Call for Matthew Quade by Oliver Crawford, Waterman's debut appearance in the media. The following year he played a boy with diabetes who is kidnapped by his own father in Night Train for Inverness, a Danziger Brothers second feature, and in the same year I remember seeing the young Dennis in Pat Jackson's Snowball, a nifty little supporting feature from Independent Artists about a boy who claims he was turned off a school bus by the conductor and had to walk home for several miles. Waterman junior was very convincing as the lying young lad and was even then showing great promise in a career that lasted for over sixty years.

Dennis Waterman was born in Clapham, south London, to a family of nine children. His father, Harry, was a British Railways ticket collector who was also an amateur boxer who made his sons learn the pugilist art. Dennis was ten when he joined a local boxing club, although his older brother Ken had taken him to watch boxing from the age of three. No doubt young Dennis learned how to look after himself by becoming a tasty fighter which may have helped him get his sort of future acting parts. After primary school in Putney, Dennis attended the Corona Stage School in Hammersmith, west London, and immediately after that his career began in earnest in the two films mentioned above.

He went on to do theatre work from the age of thirteen in small roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1961 he was in the London production of Meredith Willson's musical The Music Man with Van Johnson at the Adelphi. Then he secured the part of William Brown in the BBC TV series based on Richmal Crompton's Just William books. He landed the title role in Lionel Bart's musical Oliver! at the Mermaid Theatre and continued to do stage work throughout much of his career. He was in Edward Bond's controversial Saved and other plays by Arnold Wesker, John Arden and Harley Granville-Barker at the Royal Court, and appeared with the RSC in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych. His other musical roles were in A Slice of Saturday Night, Windy City and My Fair Lady, the last at Drury Lane and the National Theatre where he also appeared in plays by Synge, Chekhov, Pinter, Michael Frayn, Edward Albee, Brecht, John Vanbrugh, August Wilson, John Osborne, Mark Ravenhill and Charlotte Jones.

From 1962, Waterman was regularly employed in cinema and on television. Among his films in the 1960s were Crooks Anonymous, The Pirates of Blood River, Go Cart Go, Up the Junction, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know, Wedding Night and This, That and the Other. In the 1970s his films included Scars of Dracula, Fright (with George Cole), Man in the Wilderness (with Richard Harris), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (as the Two of Spades), The Belstone Fox and Sweeney!, the result of Waterman's appearances in the TV series of the same name. He had already made a mark in the TV series of Colditz in 1972 and Special Branch in 1974, the year he embarked on over fifty episodes of The Sweeney, as D.S. George Carter, with John Thaw as D.I. Jack Regan. There was also a film sequel, Sweeney 2. The TV series and the films saw him in tough roles and he was generally cast in rough, tough parts in which he was always very convincing.

Following other series such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Tube Mice came the series that Waterman will be most remembered for and identified with, the title role in Minder, in which he played Terry McCann, the heavy who looked after the dubious exploits of would-be entrepreneur Arthur Daley, played by George Cole in more than seventy episodes over ten years from 1979. It is still a popular series and is constantly repeated many times a week. Waterman then did mostly television work up until his final notable series came along in the shape of New Tricks where he played Gerry Standing, one of a team of ex-detectives working on unsolved criminal cases. He stayed with the complete series of ninety-nine episodes from 2003 to 2015, even as other original cast members (including Alun Armstrong, James Bolam and Amanda Redman) dropped out along the way.

Dennis Waterman had a fantastically successful career and never stopped working for some six decades. He was fortunate to be in several, long-running television series that became icons of the medium. He was also something of a musician and lyric writer, having penned and sang 'I Could Be So Good For You', the theme from Minder, and 'It's All Right', the song from New Tricks. He also recorded several singles for the DJM, C&D and EMI labels, as well as three albums.

He married and divorced the actresses Penny Dixon, Patricia Maynard and Rula Lenska, but at his death he was married to the former model and actress Pam Flint. The mother of his daughters, Hannah and Julia, is Patricia Maynard.

MICHAEL DARVELL