Frank Windsor
Classically trained actor who became a household name in the 1960s as DS John Watt in Z Cars
FRANK WINDSOR, who has died aged 92, was one of the stars of the groundbreaking 1960s BBC Television series Z Cars, the first police drama to portray the thin blue line as real – and flawed – human beings. As Det Sgt John Watt, the number two in the fictional Newtown CID (based on Kirkby, an overspill town north of Liverpool), Windsor wore a permanent air of worried decency as his immediate boss, Det Insp Charlie Barlow (Stratford Johns) harassed him at every turn.
The pair were promoted and transplanted to a regional crime squad in the West Country in the sequel Softly Softly. Later still they were relocated to “Thamesford” and the programme retitled Softly Softly – Task Force.
But like many television actors of the day, Windsor was classically trained and belonged to the world of the London stage, having appeared in such productions as Androcles and the Lion, Brand and Travesties with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In Z Cars – and in Softly Softly – there was an element of yin and yang to the blunt-speaking characters of Barlow and Watt, with Windsor providing a gentler foil to Johns’s overbearing Barlow, a bullying bear of a man who would not scruple to resort to verbal or even physical violence. Like others in the cast, among them Leonard Rossiter and Brian Blessed, Windsor and Johns soon became household names, drawing a weekly audience of some 14 million viewers. Early episodes were broadcast live.
In 1973 Windsor and Johns broke away from their fictional cases – but not their television characters – to consider the real-life Victorian mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper in a six-part miniseries. The pair pored over various theories, but in the end even television’s two most celebrated detectives could draw no firm conclusion.
The two characters appeared again in another short series, Second Verdict, investigating unsolved murder cases from real life.
Many viewers assumed that Windsor was a north countryman as John Watt, but in fact his roots were in the Black Country. He was born Frank Windsor Higgins on July 12 1928 at Walsall, the son of a local government official. His secure family background led, he said, to a deep-seated fear of unemployment, and turned him into something of a workaholic.
Educated at Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall, he started his National Service in the RAF in March 1947. He was an air radio mechanic, and as a Leading Aircraftman served on Transport Command airfields in the south of England. He started acting in RAF station shows.
On demob in June 1949 he found regular work in radio and was a founder member of the Oxford and Cambridge Players (later the Elizabethan Players).
His television appearances began in 1960 in the Shakespearean anthology An Age of Kings and the following year he played the scientist Dennis Bridger in the science-fiction series A for Andromeda.
His role as Watt in Z Cars started in 1962 and lasted, in assorted incarnations, for nearly 15 years. “Playing the same character on television wasn’t boring,” he recalled, “because there were always new lines, new plots, new things for John Watt to react to.”
But Windsor was too good an actor to be typecast. Indeed, when Softly Softly ended in 1976 he appeared in two further television series, Headmaster and Middleman, both screened in 1977.
Fearing he was becoming overexposed, he decided to concentrate on stage work. “If you’re on every week in the same series and the audience like that series, they will accept you completely,” he said. “But when you keep cropping up in lots of different things, they get tired of you.”
In 1978 he appeared at the Mermaid Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. “The part of the hospital psychiatrist was well acted by Frank Windsor,” noted Francis King in The Sunday Telegraph. A television version of the play drew a similar response from Richard Last in The Daily Telegraph: “Frank Windsor produces a memorable performance.”
He attracted more favourable reviews in Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw at the Old Vic in 1979, and the following year appeared at the Chichester Festival. He featured in serious theatre throughout the 1980s, appearing in Mr Fothergill’s Murder in 1982 and as Caliban in The Tempest.
Windsor never liked to be without work, and accepted radio and television roles with relish. In 1987 he starred in the Yorkshire Television sitcom Flying Lady (“a lovely part, a delightful character and a great idea – a man who blows all his redundancy on a Rolls-royce”). Notable later credits included Peak Practice and Casualty.
The hard-working Windsor was well-liked in showbusiness. At home in Holland Park, west London, his hobbies included tending his vines to make his own wine, dogs (he kept rottweilers), and working for the World Wildlife Fund and the Variety Club of Great Britain.
Frank Windsor is survived by his wife, Mary Corbett, a former dancer, and their daughter. Their son died in a car accident in 1997.
Frank Windsor, born July 12 1928, died September 30 2020