Star of Minder had ‘a nice little earner’ playing rough-hewn Londoner characters
By the age of 16 Dennis Waterman, who has died aged 74, could boast a CV that included Shakespeare at Stratfordupon-Avon, The Music Man in the West End, Richmal Crompton’s William on television and a sitcom in Hollywood. Yet unlike many child actors he went on to an even more successful adult career.
For 15 years in the 1970s and 1980s he had star billing in The Sweeney and Minder, two of the most successful television series of the time. In both he played essentially the same character, the rough-hewn, streetwise but likeable Londoner, and it was a persona from which he rarely escaped.
In The
Sweeney, a drama based on the Metropolitan
Police Flying
Squad, his toughnut DS George
Carter was teamed with
John Thaw’s DI Jack Regan, both attired in modish flared trousers and kipper ties. It was one of the first police shows in which the cops behaved as badly as the villains and, with its staple diet of fisticuffs and gunfights, set new levels of violence on television, albeit mitigated by a vein of dark humour to which Waterman strongly contributed.
Almost as soon as The Sweeney had finished he signed up for Minder. ‘‘They said, ‘It’s set in west London,’ and I thought, ‘Hmm, should I do this, or should I actually be thinking of veering away from the Sweeney image?’ And then I read it and thought, ‘Sod the image! This is going to be massive, it’s so funny and so good’.’’
As Terry McCann, former prisoner 147639, who becomes bodyguard to Arthur Daley, a used-car salesman, he was nominally the lead character. However, he was soon eclipsed by George Cole, who made Daley a by-word for dodgy dealing. Yet, stooge or not, Waterman’s role was invaluable. He also sang the Minder theme, I Could be so Good For You, taking it to No 3 in the charts in October 1980.
Despite a lifetime on the screen and stage, Waterman was modest about his career longevity, shrugging it off as nothing more than luck. ‘‘I’ve been unbelievably lucky that I keep falling into really good work. I’ve never thought, ‘I must play Hamlet before I’m 70’,’’ he said in 2009.
Dennis Waterman was born into a working-class family in Clapham, south London, the youngest of nine children of Rose and her husband Harry, an upholsterer, railway ticket collector and amateur boxer who encouraged his sons in the art of pugilism. They grew up on a Putney council estate and Dennis was encouraged by his sisters to tread the boards. ‘‘I made my debut at Brixton town hall when I was nine, wrestling with a snake as Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost.’’
Waterman’s personal life was rarely out of the public gaze and the tabloid press seized gleefully on the heavy drinking of ‘‘Dennis the menace’’. It led to two driving bans and a string of well-documented affairs. Cheerfully conceding that he found it difficult to be either faithful or abstemious, Waterman did little to contradict a reputation for a laddish lifestyle centred on booze, women and football. His marriages to the actresses Penny Dixon (in 1967), Patricia Maynard (1977) and Rula Lenska (1987), whom he met on the set of Minder, were dissolved. The break-up with Lenska led to public recriminations and he was later criticised for trivialising domestic violence when he described how he hit her but insisted that she was not ‘‘a beaten wife’’.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Pam Flint, whom he married in 2011, and by his daughters, both from his second marriage. During a break from Minder he starred in, and part-financed, The World Cup: a Captain’s Tale (1982), a fact-based television film about an amateur football team from the Durham coalfields that won an early (1910) version of the World Cup by beating Juventus in Italy.
By the end of the 1980s he had gone into film production, setting up East End Films with two colleagues. He sank much of his own money into its inaugural project, Cold Justice (1991), in which he played a boxer-turned-priest, but the film was a commercial disaster and its failure left him with large debts.
During the 1990s Waterman was increasingly seen in the theatre. He played the legendary Soho drunk in Keith Waterhouse’s Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and when appearing in My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he built a bar in the corner of his dressing room.
In his next long-running television show, New Tricks, he played the old-school Cockney detective Gerry Standing. It ran for 12 series from 2003 to 2014. Looking back on his characters in Sweeney and The Minder, Waterman said that he could have done either of them in his sleep because neither required him to stray much outside a version of himself. ‘‘I’m about as far removed from an intellectual actor as you can get,’’he said. ‘‘My method is mostly based on heart and bollocks.’’
‘‘I’ve been unbelievably lucky that I keep falling into really good work. I’ve never thought, ‘I must play Hamlet before I’m 70.’’’ Dennis Waterman