Colin Welland

Colin Welland, the actor and scriptwriter, who has died aged 81, won an Oscar in 1982 for his screenplay for the film Chariots of Fire; on receiving the award he famously proclaimed “The British Are Coming” .

Welland began his career as a television actor in the 1960s, playing the role of Constable David Graham, one of the original characters based at Newtown police station in the long-running police serial Z

Cars. It was on this series that he began trying his hand at scriptwriting.

His scripts reached a cinema audience with John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979), and he continued to enjoy a parallel career as an actor, winning acclaim for his supporting role in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) and appearing in Sam Peckinpah’s

Straw Dogs (1971). He also achieved a genuine triumph in Dennis Potter’s television play

Blue Remembered Hills (1979). Chariots of Fire concerned the 1924 Olympics in Paris and the stories of two of Britain’s runners, both outsiders – the Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and the Scottish Christian missionary Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson). Welland’s script eschewed melodrama but convincingly conveyed the vulnerability of the two athletes in their singleminded determination to win. The film was an entirely British production, became a box office hit and garnered seven Oscar nominations and four wins.