Colin Welland, Oscar-winning writer of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ dead at age 81
Colin Welland, a Liverpudlian screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Chariots of Fire” (1981), the dramatic tale of two Olympian runners who defied both the odds and the British establishment in 1924, died Nov. 2 at his home in London. He was 81.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Anthony Jones, his literary agent.
The success of “Chariots of Fire” was perhaps as improbable as that of Welland, who had once abandoned his dreams of acting to teach art. A relatively inexpensive historical film, it interweaves the stories of a highly motivated English Jew and a Church of Scotland preacher who compete on the British team.
“Can you imagine going in to a Hollywood mogul and saying, ‘I have this idea about two Olympic athletes from 1924’?” Welland asked an interviewer.
But “Chariots of Fire” emerged as an upset winner, with Oscars for best picture — beating “Atlantic City,” “On Golden Pond,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Reds” — and best original screenplay. (It also won for best costumes and best original score, a rousing work by Greek composer Vangelis that became a hit recording.)
In his acceptance speech, Welland thanked the Academy for celebrating the British film industry, particularly after another British film that year, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” received five Oscar nominations.
“The British are coming!” Welland declared from the stage.
His screenplay championed the individual triumphing over the establishment. Writing in The New York Times, film critic Vincent Canby said of the two main characters, “In the way that Eric Liddell runs to honor God, Harold Abrahams, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant who made a fortune in England, runs to become visible in the Anglo-Saxon society that pretends not to notice his Jewishness.”
Canby said the film was an “unashamedly rousing, invigorating but very cleareyed evocation of values of the old-fashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated.”
Welland gave expression to one such value in the character of Liddell, who saw running as a means of glorifying God and refused to race on a Sunday.
“I believe God made me for a purpose,” Liddell says, “but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
Colin Edward Williams was born July 4, 1934, in Leigh, Lancashire, in northwest England, to John Williams and the former Nora Downs. He grew up further south in the Kensington area of Liverpool, a city he considered his home, and later moved to Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire. Survivors include his wife, the former Patricia Sweeney; four children and six grandchildren.
Stifling his childhood ambition to act, he studied at Bretton Hall College of Education and Goldsmiths College in South London (a constituent of the University of London) and, at his father’s urging, taught art.
But at 26 he was hired as an actor and assistant stage manager by Manchester Library Theater. He appeared in Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” and later thrived for three years as a constable in a British television police series, “Z-Cars.”
He also appeared in a number of films, among them Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 thriller, “Straw Dogs,” starring Dustin Hoffman.
With Walter Bernstein, Welland wrote the 1979 John Schlesinger film “Yanks,” which concerns the cultural strains between the reserved residents of semirural Northern England and the brash U.S. soldiers stationed there as they mobilize for D-Day. The film starred Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave.
In writing the film, Welland drew on his own recollections of his wartime youth and solicited them from others as well, including strangers.
“I was quite literally the kid in the movie who gets a hatful of coins from the soldier who won it in a crap game,” Welland told The Times. “What he says, ‘Spend it for me, kid,’ is exactly what was actually said to me.”
He took a similar tack before writing “Chariots of Fire,” taking out classified advertisements asking 1924 Olympians to share their memories.
In one response, he received a cache of letters from a former athlete who had written home as he was girding for the Games. (“I was absolutely amazed at the naïveté of them,” Welland said.) He also learned that Abrahams had a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, which provided a good excuse to suffuse the film with their scores as incidental music.
Among his other credits was the screenplay for the 1989 film “A Dry White Season,” based on André Brink’s novel about South African life under apartheid.
After “Chariots,” Welland proposed another historical film, this one titled “Rocket,” about engineers George and Robert Stephenson, the English father and son who developed rail travel in the 19th century.
“I took ‘Rocket’ to America immediately after ‘Chariots of Fire’ had come out,” Welland wrote in The Guardian in 2001. “‘We want another Chariots of Fire,’” I was told.”
“‘It is another ‘Chariots of Fire,’ I said. ‘Men against the establishment. Robert Stephenson couldn’t read and write, yet he was the greatest engineer of his generation. He had the world against him, yet he fought through. It is another ‘Chariots of Fire.’”
“But they wanted another film about runners.”