Frank Windsor

Staffordshire-born actor who achieved popularity as Detective Chief Superintendent John Watt on Z Cars (1962) and Softly Softly: Task Force (1969). The son of an accountant, he studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and began his career on radio before proceeding to the classical stage. A co-founder of the Elizabethan Theatre Company (formerly the Oxford and Cambridge Players), he toured Britain and India and first appeared on screen in 1955. At the outset, his theatrical training made him ideal casting for powerful historical figures, beginning with BBC's seminal Shakespearean anthology series An Age of Kings (1960) in which he played (among others) the Earl of Warwick and Sir Walter Blunt. A stalwart acting veteran whose career spanned almost five decades, he was for much of it typecast as senior policemen (attributable to his fame as John Watt, his alter ego in hundreds of TV episodes between 1962 and 1978). Windsor occasionally broke out of the mold: scientist Dennis Bridger in the cult science-fiction classic A for Andromeda (1961), the head of a Rolls Royce for-hire business in Flying Lady (1987) and title roles in the miniseries Headmaster (1977) and The Real Eddy English (1989). He also appeared to good effect as the luckless chancery suitor Gridley in BBC's second adaptation of Masterpiece Theatre: Bleak House (1985) by Charles Dickens.