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Charismatic actor who drew on his troubled past for the role of ‘Dirty Den’ Watts in Eastenders
Leslie Grantham, who played Queen Vic landlord “Dirty Den” Watts in Eastenders, has died aged 71. Grantham, pictured with Anita Dobson and Letitia Dean, played a key role in some of the BBC soap’s most explosive storylines.
LESLIE GRANTHAM, who has died aged 71, played Dirty Den in the BBC soap opera Eastenders and became television’s best-known rogue – but he struggled to live with a secret from his distant past that was only revealed when he started playing the role.
Unknown to the BBC producers or the other members of the Eastenders cast, Grantham had served 11 years of a life sentence for murdering a taxi driver in Germany in 1966. His conviction only came to light as tabloid journalists started digging into the actor’s background.
The story broke in the Sun three days after Eastenders launched in February 1985. Grantham, as Dennis Watts, landlord of the Queen Vic, had uttered the deathless first line in episode one – “Stinks in ’ere!” – as he kicked down the door of a council flat in the fictional Walford to find Reg Cox dead in his chair. Seventeen million viewers were watching.
“Eastenders star is killer” was the Sun’s splash headline. From the off the newspaper had had a mole in the Eastenders production office prepared to sell stories. To protect the source the Sun pretended that Grantham had been sold out by a former fellow prisoner who had recognised him on television. The paper had known the story for weeks but the editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, held his nerve and ran the scoop after the show had launched for maximum impact.
During his first three and a half years in the show, Grantham became one of its principal stars, benefiting from storylines featuring his marital squabbles with his screen wife Angie (played by Anita Dobson), the eventual break-up of their marriage, and Den’s subsequent disappearance and suspected murder.
Although in character Grantham played the cocky, charming blackguard, in real life he became the tabloids’ public enemy number one. The revelations about his past did wonders for the show’s ratings, which continued to climb.
The name “Dirty Den” was bestowed by The Daily Telegraph in the autumn of 1985 after the 16-yearold Michelle Fowler (Susan Tully) fell pregnant and the search began for the father of the baby, other contenders being “Randy Ross” and “Naughty Nedj”.
By the time Den was revealed to be the father, Eastenders had ousted Coronation Street from the top of the ratings. A year later, the two episodes screened on Christmas Day 1986 – when Den served divorce papers on his unsuspecting wife – attracted an average 30 million viewers, then a British television record.
By 1988 Grantham was the highly paid heart-throb star of Britain’s most popular television show, which was delivering an average weekly audience of 19 million viewers. After nearly four years and 410 episodes, in 1989 Grantham’s character was supposedly shot dead by the side of a canal during an attempted bid to leave the country, his adopted daughter Sharon (Letitia Dean) identifying his body.
But as audiences learnt 14 years later, instead of going to a watery grave in the canal, he had embarked on a new life in Spain and in 2003 Grantham as Dirty Den made a sensational return to the series, greeting his daughter Sharon with the familiar line “Hello, Princess”.
In May 2004, however, the actor was exposed in a tabloid sting operation after taking part in a webcam sex session, during which he also made disparaging comments about fellow cast members. The exposé prompted another woman to come forward to claim that when Grantham was working in panto some years previously, he had “pleasured himself in front of a webcam” while dressed as Captain Hook.
Grantham later issued a grovelling apology to the BBC, and cast and crew of the series, for what he called “a moment’s stupidity” and Dirty Den went on to wreak further havoc on Albert Square before he was killed off for good in 2005 when his second wife, Chrissie – played by Tracy-ann Oberman – hit him over the head with an iron doorstop.
“My life has not been an easy one, although a lot of my troubles have been of my own making,” Grantham confessed in his autobiography Life and Other Times (2006).
Leslie Michael Grantham was born on April 29 1947 in Camberwell, south London, and brought up in a council house at St Mary Cray, near Orpington. Making his stage debut aged seven at Poverest junior school, he played Joseph in a nativity play. He left Herne’s Rise secondary school at 15 with no qualifications and joined the Army as a boy soldier in the 1st Bn Royal Fusiliers, his father’s old regiment, with the British Army of the Rhine.
In April 1967, when he was still a 19-year-old lance-corporal, Grantham was convicted by a court martial at Bielefeld of the murder of a German taxi-driver at Osnabrück the previous December. He had shot Felix Reese through the head after demanding money, but claimed he had not realised that the pistol he was carrying was loaded. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, reduced to the ranks and discharged with ignominy.
The story that emerged years later was that he had been threatened by four other soldiers in his unit over the repayment of a debt. He had robbed the taxi driver only after his tormentors had laid a red-hot steam iron on his forehead and threatened to kill him. Two appeals were refused and he served 11 years in jail.
Bizarrely his victim’s skull was on public display at a new Black Museum at the Royal Military Police depot in Chichester, but was withdrawn and offered to the man’s widow for burial in May 1985.
During his incarceration – he spent the first four years in Wormwood Scrubs – Grantham acted in prison plays and wrote a couple himself. On his release in 1978 he studied for three years at the Webber Douglas stage school. He was in rep at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and broke into television in the early 1980s with bit parts in Jake’s End, Jewel in the Crown, Bulman and Doctor Who.
In between acting jobs, he took part-time work at a greengrocer’s in South Kensington and in the evenings worked as a barman at a bingo hall behind Fulham Broadway station. A chance meeting led to a job selling Italian designer clothes from a shop in the Fulham Road.
In 1984 Grantham was mentioned in a casting meeting for the BBC’S proposed new soap series, at which the producer, Julia Smith, remembered teaching someone of that name at the Webber Douglas school. At an initial audition she noticed his white knuckles and sweating brow, which she ascribed to extreme nerves. Grantham ticked several boxes: the producers wanted an unknown but someone who had starry panache, charisma, electricity.
With Grantham, as well as a sense of humour, they sensed a tensed-up internal emotion of some sort just being held in. One of the series creators, Tony Holland, thought Grantham too thin for a publican, but behind the eyes Julia Smith discerned barely contained violence.
Grantham was initially considered as a potential Pete Beale but was offered the part of Dennis Watts instead, on an initial contract of 12 weeks.
After Eastenders he starred in The Paradise Club (1989), a 10-part crime adventure on BBC One which the producers hoped would be the answer to ITV’S Minder; Grantham was the upwardly mobile Danny Kane running a seedy dance hall with his half brother, a disgraced priest played by Don Henderson.
He starred as a boxing promoter, Eddie Burt, in Winners and Losers (1989); as an undercover cop, Mick Raynor, in 99-1 (1994-95); as Col Mustard in Cluedo (1993); and as Chief Superintendent Gates in The Uninvited (1997), of which he was also creator and executive producer. He also co-hosted the game show Fort Boyard (1998-2001) and was a voice in the animation Time Keepers of the Millennium (1999).
Leslie Grantham’s marriage to the actress Jane Laurie ended in divorce after 31 years and subsequently he moved to Bulgaria, where he spent time filming the drama The English Neighbour in 2010 and decided to stay.
In 2016 he was reported to have embarked on a new career as a children’s author, publishing a debut novel, Jack Bates and the Wizard’s Spell, a fantasy tale described in one newspaper as combining “the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower and the story of King Richard III with myth and legend, featuring pixies and trolls”.
“Life isn’t a straight line,” he told the Mirror. “It’s like travelling the motorway. Every now and then, you have to take a diversion. Unfortunately, some of my diversions have been quite catastrophic. But I’m safe in the knowledge that what I do now is good.”
Leslie Grantham is survived by three sons.
Leslie Grantham, born April 29 1947, died June 15 2018