EastEnders star whose own life made Dirty Den’s look tame
Jailed for murder, sacked over a sex scandal, left homeless by divorce. Leslie Grantham, who has died at 71, was the . . .
COR, stinks in ’ere, dunnit?’ With those innocuous words 33 years ago, actor Leslie Grantham, who died yesterday aged 71, started a television institution — one which would turn him and the character he played into a household name.
When Grantham landed the role of shifty publican Dennis ‘Dirty Den’ Watts in EastEnders, he was a little-known actor trying to turn his life around following a murder conviction and more than ten years in jail.
The twice-weekly soap opera was launched on February 19, 1985, as the BBC’s riposte to ITV’s Coronation Street. Its first line was uttered by Den as he broke down the door of a flat belonging to elderly Reg Cox, who was discovered almost dead.
That Tuesday night, viewers had no idea who Dennis Watts was. Less than two years later, his place in the TV firmament was secure.
Grantham had only signed to do ten episodes in a drama that was meant to revolve around two families, the Fowlers and the Beales.
But it soon became clear there was a crackling electricity between Dennis and his wife Angie (played by Anita Dobson). They carried the show and drove its enormous early success.
The most dramatic confrontation came on Christmas Day 1986 when tens of millions watched the Watts family turn to dust amid a welter of recrimination.
No sooner had Angie, from under her huge, gravity-defying perm, simpered: ‘Nothing can go wrong, Den, I want this to be the best Christmas we’ve ever had at the Vic,’ than he dropped his bombshell.
He’d discovered that she had faked a terminal illness in a desperate bid to stop him leaving her for his posh mistress. Nobody did the dirty on Dirty Den and got away with it.
HE HANDED a solicitor’s letter to his long-suffering, alcoholic wife. It said he was filing for divorce. ‘Happy Christmas, Ange,’ he sneered, as that dramatic drumbeat kicked off the famous theme tune. It was voted the No.1 soap moment of all time in a 2004 poll, and there’s no doubt Den and Angie were one of TV’s great double-acts, lovey-dovey one minute, at each other’s throats the next.
Thanks to the quality of the acting, and the writing, they were an entirely plausible East End couple.
No one who supped in Albert Square’s Queen Vic pub was as important to the show as Den, Angie, and their beloved adopted daughter Sharon (Letitia Dean) who’s still in it today.
Even now, of all the characters to have emerged from Albert Square, few have captured the imagination quite like the adulterous, belligerent, conniving, dastardly Den, who was at the heart of all the most gripping storylines, not least the one-night stand with Sharon’s best friend Michelle (Susan Tully) that produced an illegitimate daughter.
When Den was written out in 1989 because Grantham was ‘fed up’ with some of the other actors — he accused them of non-stop moaning, and preferring to open supermarkets rather than turn up to work on time — it was as if, not too far from fictional Walford, the ravens were leaving the Tower of London.
Reluctantly, EastEnders creators Tony Holland and Julia Smith made plans to kill him off. But the controller of BBC1, Jonathan Powell, insisted that his apparent murder be left ambiguous in case Den needed to be brought back if the ratings required a boost.
Holland and Smith were furious at being overruled and quit the show they had conceived. Even offscreen, trouble seemed to follow Dirty Den around.
Powell was proved right, though. In September 2003, 16 million viewers saw Den return spectacularly with an even more laconic one-liner than his infamous ‘Happy Christmas, Ange’.
This time the episode closed with a soft ‘Hello princess’, as he walked back into his daughter Sharon’s life.
His character was the ultimate survivor — living through not just being shot and collapsing into a canal in that 1989 episode, but a subsequent 14 years spent on the run from mobsters on the Costa Del Sol (which explained his absence from the show).
Den’s second stint lasted 18 months, before his on-screen second wife Chrissie finished him off for good by clocking him on the head with an iron doorstop after she caught him having an affair.
What made the portrayal of Dirty Den so compelling is that viewers knew the real life of Leslie Grantham was at least as eventful as that of his alter ego. He was born in South London but grew up on a council estate in Kent, where he was close to his father but had a fractious relationship with his mother.
When she died in 1997, after several years of selling stories about him to the Press — ‘she’d probably run out of fag money’ was how he contemptuously explained it — he declined to go to her funeral.
As a child, he nurtured an ambition to become an actor, but kept it secret. ‘You couldn’t tell people,’ he once recalled. ‘They’d think you were a woofter. I used to go to the theatre in Bromley and make out I’d been to the football.’
Little did he anticipate that he would take his first steps as an actor in prison, while serving a life sentence for murder.
In 1965, aged 18, Grantham joined the Royal Fusiliers. He was posted to Germany and made a lance corporal. Then, in December 1966,
he made the catastrophic decision to rob taxi driver Felix Reese in the town of Osnabruck.
When Grantham threatened Reese with a pistol and asked him to hand over his money, the brave cabbie grabbed the gun and tried to wrestle it out of Grantham’s hands.
As the pair grappled, it went off and the driver was shot in the head. Grantham later admitted: ‘In my panic, I just ran for it.’
After he was arrested, he claimed he had not realised the pistol was loaded and that he never intended to harm the driver.
If true, this detail could have seen his crime downgraded from murder to manslaughter, and it formed a key part of his defence.
However, on April 17, 1967, he was convicted of murder at a court martial held in Germany and sentenced to life in prison. In the end, he served more than ten years.
His first jail stint was served in army detention in Germany before he was moved back to Britain, first being held in Wormwood Scrubs, then HMP Portsmouth, before ending up at Leyhill in Gloucestershire. There, he joined a drama group and appeared in plays.
He also realised he needed to develop a new persona, presenting himself as one of the jail’s tough guys, he said, for the same reason he didn’t confess his childhood acting ambitions — so he wouldn’t be considered gay.
In reality, he always denied being a tough guy, but it was an act that would serve him well as Dirty Den, and later as a gangster in the BBC drama The Paradise Club.
Speaking about his past, two years ago, Grantham said: ‘Life isn’t a straight line. It’s like travelling the motorway. Every now and then, you have to take a diversion. Unfortunately, some of my diversions have been catastrophic.
‘But I’m safe in the knowledge that what I do now is good. I have regrets, but you can’t go round wearing a hair shirt all your life, otherwise you’ll never get out of bed in the morning. I f **** d up, now I’m going to move on.’
After leaving prison, Grantham won a place at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, funding it by working as a painter and decorator.
It was there he met his future wife, Jane — an actress from a wealthy Australian wine-making family. They went on to have three sons, the youngest of whom was born with Down syndrome.
They divorced in 2013. Jane had stood by him in 2004 when he was caught exposing himself online to a woman who turned out to be an undercover reporter. He was doing panto at the time, and was in his dressing room, allegedly wearing his Captain Hook outfit.
The Press had a field day with Dirty Den headlines, and the fallout saw him sacked from East-Enders. Grantham claimed he had attempted suicide as a result of the scandal. On the whole, he was sanguine about the disadvantages of fame (such as being targeted by an undercover reporter), while appreciating its benefits.
He tried never to let it go to his head, and was scornful of those who did. He thought it eroded their work ethic, and hated to hear actors protesting about their scripts, pretentiously complaining that their character would never do this or that.
‘They forget that if they weren’t in East-Enders, no one would want them to open a car showroom in the first place,’ he said. Nonetheless, in refusing to take himself or his chosen profession too seriously, he could appear ungrateful, and worse, disrespectful of his millions of fans.
In 2003, shortly after his high-profile return to East-Enders, he admitted he was ‘still mystified’ by the show’s success. ‘I never watch it,’ he said. ‘Some of the storylines are half-baked, some are boring.’
He insisted there was no mystique about acting. All he had to do was ‘walk and talk’. As for the millions who would hang on Dirty Den’s every word, he dismissively said that only proved how ‘sad’ they were. Yet it’s as Dirty Den that he’ll be remembered.
Beforehand, he’d only managed small parts in the ITV drama Jewel In The Crown, the film Morons From Outer Space and Doctor Who.
During his years away from Albert Square, he was co-host of adventure game show Fort Boyard with Melinda Messenger, appeared in The Detectives, a comedy drama starring Jasper Carrott, and as Colonel Mustard in the game show Cluedo.
Afterwards, his best parts were a role in police drama The Bill, and as a retired chemist in Bulgarian TV series The English Neighbour.
It was his time spent in the Eastern European country that inspired him to set up home there after his marriage collapsed and the divorce left him homeless.
He revealed five years ago that he was staying in a friend’s spare room after splitting from his wife Jane after 31 years of marriage.
Talking about buying a house in Bulgaria, he said: ‘I made a lot of friends out there and I am planning to move out when the financial details of my divorce are finalised.
‘I’m an old man now and want to go somewhere hot. I really enjoyed it there. I had to learn Bulgarian and even Hungarian.’
It was only recently that the star, who is thought to have been single in his final months, returned to the UK for treatment for the illness, understood to be lung cancer, that proved fatal.
Grantham had been visited by supporters from the TV world in the weeks before his death, and he told some he had terminal cancer.
Friends said he was ‘gaunt and grey’, and had been living in a friend’s terrace house London.
One said: ‘He was positive about it...he said he had it and it went but it came back.’
Hollyoaks actor Joe Tracini tweeted: ‘Last week he could barely hold his head up or make a sound. I held his hand for a while, kissed his forehead and told him I loved him.
‘As I left, he bellowed: “What, am I f ***** g dying or something?” ’
ANITA Dobson, who played Angie, yesterday revealed she had been planning to visit Grantham in hospital to say goodbye and tell him ‘you made TV history’, but never got the chance.
Paying tribute to her former screen husband, she praised him as ‘the archetypal charming rogue’ and ‘always fun to be around’.
‘There was always that look about him that you didn’t know what he was going to do next, she said. ‘That was his ace in the hole.’
And on the success of Den and Angie, she added: ‘We were lucky that we were cast opposite each other. The chemistry was magic.’
Letitia Dean, who played daughter Sharon, said: ‘I have very special memories of working with Leslie and will cherish them always. He and Anita looked after me in my early days and showed me the ropes, always with care and kindness.
‘He never failed to make me laugh and I will remember him with love, affection and gratitude for ever.’
Grantham appeared frail when he was last seen in public in February, filming a movie about the Krays, which is due to be released later this year.
So it was that his last years were a long way from the bright lights of Albert Square. But then Albert Square was a far cry from the inside of a prison cell.
Grantham always refused to discuss in detail the crime that removed him from society for so long, but he did admit he had done a terrible thing.
It was an issue, he said, ‘between me and my maker’. Now, finally, they can have their showdown.