World News – GB – Obituary of Frank Windsor

The fate of a policeman is not happy for the actor who played him for most of his working life Frank Windsor, who died at the age of 92, was, as DS John Watt, one of television’s oldest brass instruments – in Z Cars and its BBC sequel and spinoff 1962-1978

At this point, Windsor returned to the theater to play a Doctor Dotty in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor at the Mermaid Theater – music by André Previn, directed by Trevor Nunn – revealing another side of his talent , that of an incisive and hilarious comic actor; he gave us a taste of it when he briefly succeeded Patrick Stewart as Vladimir Lenin’s absurd barn in Stoppard’s Travesties at the Aldwych (1974)

But it proved impossible for him to shake the long arm of the cop Z Cars was indeed one of the big shows of its time, and few dramatic double acts on the small screen – apart from Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise – matched that of Stratford Johns as blunderbuss, earthy DI Charles Barlow and Windsor’s stern and more sympathetically Watt malleable as they hunted down criminals in Newtown, a fictional version of the overflowing town of Kirkby, Merseyside

Z Cars shifted questions of control in public and private arenas to the new post-war realities of the welfare state, unemployment, domestic violence, gang rivalry and cultural fragmentation Week After week, brilliantly performed and produced, it was a compelling viewing After three years, in 1966, Barlow and Watt were seconded, promoted – Chief Superintendent and Chief Detective Inspector respectively – and transferred to a new series, Softly Softly, in the fictional region of Wyvern, somewhere near Bristol

They moved back, in 1969, to the Thamesford Police CID task force, the renowned series Softly Softly: Task Force When Johns embarked on his own series, Barlow at Large, Windsor while Watt s ‘was beaten for seven years – until 1973 – with a variety of different partners over crime surveillance, but the couple were reunited on two mini-series within the franchise, the first, in 1973, reopening files on the 1880s Jack the Ripper murders, the second re-examining other more recent actual murder cases

Windsor, who was born Frank W Higgins, in Walsall, Staffordshire – his father was an accountant in the local government – must have wondered if he was an actor or a policeman He was educated at Queen Mary High School in Walsall and trained for the stage in London at the Central School of Speech and Drama, still located at that time, in the early 1950s, at the Royal Albert Hall He toured Britain and India with Thane Parker’s Elizabethan Theater Company, who also ran the Oxford Playhouse, where Parker appointed a young Peter Hall as artistic director in 1954

The cast alongside Windsor in this first season of Hall’s Oxford included Billie Whitelaw, Maggie Smith, Tony Church, and Ronald (later Ronnie) Barker, and he quickly turned to television playing the Prince heir Rudolf of Austria in a BBC Sunday Night theater play from 1955 and, in 1957, The Duke of Norfolk in a televised version of A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, three years before it became a West End hit The Windsor Experience at Shakespeare with Parker the made him well qualified to play the Earl of Warwick and Sir Walter Blunt, among other characters, in the BBC’s historic Shakespeare stories series, An Age of Kings (1960)

He played a dentist in Lindsay Anderson’s new-wave film This Sporting Life (1963), starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, but his film career – small roles in Peter Hammond’s Spring and Port Wine (1970) starring James Mason, and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch – never took off thanks to his police duties

When he escaped, in the roles of Stoppard, he emphasized his rich vocal authority and his dominating presence in another dimension He followed up with a West End thriller, Mr Fothergill’s Murder (1982) by Peter O’Donnell, author of Modesty Blaise at the Duke of York’s house, with Rula Lenska and David Horovitch, and joined the cast of the revival – Mary Miller, Miriam Karlin and Joss Ackland – in Hugh’s suburban spy drama Whitemore Pack of Lies at the Lyric in 1984 And then there was a 12 week nationwide tour of a play called Holmes and the Ripper that never hit Shaftesbury Avenue

TV fame didn’t translate into theatrical fame, perhaps unfairly, and he has spent the last 20 years of his active career supporting longtime series such as Lovejoy, EastEnders (as Major Charlie Grace, in one episode), Midsomer Murders, Peak Practice, Casualty and, in 2002, as Sir James Valentine, Judge John Deed with Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove

It was a good job, but he couldn’t get rid of John Watt. He came close, however, as Gridley, « the man from Shropshire », in the second of their three versions of the BBC to date from Dickens’ Bleak House, with Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott in 1985, making an excellent punch from the crumbling old Chancellor suitor with a combative look and an irritated and dissatisfied manner

Windsor is survived by his wife, Mary Corbett, a former dancer, and daughter, Amanda A son, David, died in a car crash in 1997

Frank Windsor