Former convict who enthralled the nation as “Dirty” Den
On Christmas Day 1986,
more than 30 million people
in the UK sat down to watch
the landlord of the Queen Vic serve divorce papers on his long-suffering wife, said BBC News online. It was a seminal moment in British television – those viewing figures, in these multichannel days, are never likely to be reached again; nor has any soap character since gripped the nation’s attention as tightly as “Dirty” Den Watts. A complex character, Den was capable of roguish charm, even kindness, but also of chilling brutality. On that Christmas Day, he offered Eastenders fans a “masterclass in sneering, scowling, superbly controlled spite. The pleasure taken in inflicting pain was both unforgettable and unbearable.”
If Den was no angel, nor was Leslie Grantham – the actor “plucked from obscurity to play him”, who has died aged 71. Born in 1947, he grew up on a council estate in Kent. He became interested in drama in his teens, but it was not something he’d admit: when he went to the theatre, he’d say he’d been to the football. After leaving his secondary modern, he joined the Royal Fusiliers; on a posting to Germany in 1966, he tried to hold up a cab driver, and in the struggle, killed him. (It seems he’d got into debt and was being intimidated by his creditors.) He claimed not to have known the gun was loaded, but was convicted of murder, and served ten years of a life term. It was in jail, he’d say, that he learnt to play the “hard man”. He also began to act, and on his release in 1978, he won a place at drama school, where he met his wife, Jane. However, he said his best acting lesson came from James Cagney. Hearing that his hero was filming nearby, Grantham waited outside the set until Cagney was driven in. “I shouted at him that I wanted to be an actor,” he recalled. “This voice came back at me, ‘Acting’s about walking through the door, planting your feet and telling the truth. Good luck.’” Grantham was cast in small roles on stage and appeared in an episode of Doctor Who. Then in 1984, he was sent to audition for a new BBC soap opera called Eastenders. He was originally put up to play Pete Beale, Albert Square’s fruit and veg trader, but the show’s co-creator Julia Smith saw something in him – a “tensed-up, internal emotion of some sort, that was being held in”, and behind the eyes, “barely contained violence, almost”. He confessed to his murder conviction, but she offered him the part of Den anyway.
Grantham signed up for ten episodes; he ended up playing Den for four years – in which time he drove his alcoholic wife, Angie (Anita Dobson), to attempt suicide; seduced his daughter Sharon’s 16-year-old best friend, getting her pregnant; and fell out with a group of mobsters known as The Firm. Tiring of the show, and the tabloid attention it brought, he quit in 1989 and Den was shot dead on a canal-side by a mystery assassin – or so it seemed. Grantham kept working after that, but he never got a part as good, and in 2003, he was persuaded to return to Eastenders. The next year, however, he was caught exposing himself to a tabloid reporter on a webcam in his dressing room. Soon after, “Dirty” Den’s new wife, Chrissie, hit him over the head with an iron doorstop and – in true soap fashion – buried him under the cellar. There would be no more Lazarus-like resurrections. As Eastenders writer Tony Jordan put it, the character was irreparably tainted. Devastated by the public humiliation, Grantham attempted suicide and his marriage to Jane, with whom he had three sons, later broke up. But he kept going, working on TV, on stage and in panto. Some actors go on about how great they are, he once said, “but I’m not a marvellous person. I’ve got a huge amount of frailties, a huge amount of complexes and a huge amount of problems.”