The Stage

Edward Woodward

Published Tuesday 1 December 2009 at 13:20 by Michael Quinn

Edward Woodward’s career spanned more than six decades from his debut in 1946 at the Castle Theatre, Farnham, to his final appearances on EastEnders earlier this year.

There was always something disquieting about him. With a square jaw, steely stare and a brooding presence that kept audiences at arm’s length, he used stillness and silence to command an often uncomfortable but compelling attention. It translated into disconcerting menace in the career-making Callan, in which he played the eponymous antiheroic spy turned hitman. A 1967 Armchair Theatre pilot introduced the character that Woodward subsequently played for 43 episodes over six years, winning him a Bafta award. He returned to the role for a 1974 film spin-off and again in 1981 for the valedictory television one-off, Wet Job.

Woodward’s own personality was far removed from Callan’s dangerous surliness. Noel Coward, who cast him in his 1963 Broadway musical version of Blithe Spirit, described him as “one of the nicest and most co-operative actors I’ve ever met or worked with”.

A RADA graduate, Woodward was an experienced theatre and television actor before Callan. He made his West End debut in 1955 in Where There’s a Will at the Garrick, enjoying later success there in Rattle of a Simple Man, which subsequently transferred to Broadway.

For the RSC in the late fifties, he was a memorable Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet) and Laertes (Hamlet), and a decade later made notable contributions to John Neville’s Nottingham Playhouse regime and the National Theatre, during the company’s final years in the Old Vic, including a notable Cyrano de Bergerac.

On TV he made early appearances in Emergency - Ward 10, Dixon of Dock Green and The Saint, and later in Play of the Month broadcasts of Julius Caesar (playing Cassius) and The Cherry Orchard (Lopakhin). In the 1998 re-make of The Professionals he reprised the role created by Gordon Jackson. He also presented the crime re-enactment series In Suspicious Circumstances and a series on war-gaming - an enthusiastic hobby.

Callan overshadowed Woodward’s television career until he virtually reinvented the role in the American-made The Equalizer. It ran for six seasons from 1985 and won him a Golden Globe and a Sexiest Man in the Nation poll by US viewers.

It was the controversial 1973 film of Anthony Schaffer’s occult thriller The Wicker Man that secured him a cult status among cinephiles. He also played the title role in 1981’s Breaker Morant, lending considerable weight to one of the films that ushered in the Australian New Wave. He made a cameo appearance in 2007’s homegrown comedy hit Hot Fuzz and his last film, the true-life drama A Congregation of Ghosts, is due for release next year.

Woodward could also boast an attractive lyric tenor singing voice, one good enough to make a dozen albums and secure him regular appearances on The Good Old Days. He also made three recordings of poetry.

Having survived two heart attacks in the late nineties, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2003. Born in Croydon on June 1, 1930, he died on November 16, aged 79, following a long bout of illness, and is survived by three children from his first marriage and his second wife, the actress Michele Dotrice, whom he married, 17 years his junior, in 1987.