Frank Windsor obituary

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one for the actor stuck playing him for much of his professional life. Frank Windsor, who has died aged 92, was, as DS John Watt, one of the longest-serving coppers on the TV beat – in Z Cars and its BBC sequels and spin-offs from 1962 right through to 1978.

At this point, Windsor returned to the theatre to play a dotty doctor in Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the Mermaid theatre – music by André Previn, direction by Trevor Nunn – revealing another side of his talent altogether, that of an incisive and hilarious comic actor; he’d given us a taste of that when he took over briefly from Patrick Stewart as an absurdly barnstorming Vladimir Lenin in Stoppard’s Travesties at the Aldwych (1974).

But it proved impossible for him to shake off the long arm of the law enforcer. Z Cars was indeed one of the great programmes of its time, and few dramatic double acts on the small screen – outside of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise – matched that of Stratford Johns as the blunderbuss, truculent DI Charles Barlow and Windsor’s stern and more sympathetically malleable Watt as they chased down the criminals in Newtown, a fictional version of the overspill town of Kirkby in Merseyside.

Z Cars moved the issues of control in public and private arenas into the new postwar realities of the welfare state, unemployment, domestic violence, gang rivalry and cultural fragmentation. Week in, week out, brilliantly acted and produced, it was compelling viewing. After three years, in 1966, Barlow and Watt were detached, promoted – to detective chief superintendent and detective chief inspector, respectively – and relocated in a new series, Softly Softly, to the fictional region of Wyvern, somewhere near Bristol.

They moved on again, in 1969, to Thamesford constabulary’s CID taskforce, the series renamed Softly Softly: Task Force. When Johns peeled off into his own series, Barlow at Large, Windsor as Watt battled on for another seven years – until 1973 – with a variety of different partners on crime watch. But the pair were reunited on two mini-series within the franchise, the first, in 1973, reopening the case files on the Jack the Ripper murders of the 1880s, the second re-examining other, more recent real-life murder cases.

Windsor, who was born Frank W Higgins, in Walsall, Staffordshire – his father was an accountant in local government – must have wondered whether he was an actor or a policeman. He was educated at Queen Mary’s grammar school in Walsall and trained for the stage in London at the Central School of Speech and Drama, still situated in those days, the early 1950s, at the Royal Albert Hall. He toured in Britain and India with the Elizabethan Theatre Company of Thane Parker, who also ran the Oxford Playhouse, where Parker appointed a young Peter Hall as artistic director in 1954.

The actors alongside Windsor in that first Oxford season of Hall included Billie Whitelaw, Maggie Smith, Tony Church and Ronald (later Ronnie) Barker, and he soon moved into television playing the Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria in a BBC Sunday Night Theatre play of 1955 and, in 1957, the Duke of Norfolk in a television version of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, three years before it became a West End hit. Windsor’s experience in Shakespeare with Parker made him well qualified to play the Earl of Warwick and Sir Walter Blunt, among other characters, in the landmark BBC series of Shakespeare histories, An Age of Kings (1960).

He played a dentist in Lindsay Anderson’s new-wave movie This Sporting Life (1963), with Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, but his movie career – small parts in Peter Hammond’s Spring and Port Wine (1970) with James Mason, and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) with Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch – never took off thanks to his police duties.

When he did break out, into the Stoppard stage roles, he underlined his rich vocal authority and commanding presence in another dimension. He followed up with a West End thriller, Mr Fothergill’s Murder (1982) by Modesty Blaise author Peter O’Donnell at the Duke of York’s, with Rula Lenska and David Horovitch, and joined the takeover cast – Mary Miller, Miriam Karlin and Joss Ackland – in Hugh Whitemore’s spies-in-suburbia drama Pack of Lies at the Lyric in 1984. And then there was a 12-week national tour of a play unpromisingly titled Holmes and the Ripper that never hit Shaftesbury Avenue.

Television fame did not translate into theatrical stardom, perhaps unjustly, and he spent the last 20 years of his active career propping up such long-running series as Lovejoy, EastEnders (as Major Charlie Grace, in just one episode), Midsomer Murders, Peak Practice, Casualty and, in 2002, as Sir James Valentine, Judge John Deed with Martin Shaw and Jenny Seagrove.

This was good work, but he couldn’t shake off John Watt. He came close, though, as Gridley, “the man from Shropshire”, in the BBC’s second of their three versions to date of Dickens’s Bleak House, starring Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott in 1985, making an excellent fist of the ruined old Chancery suitor with a combative look and a chafing, dissatisfied manner.

Windsor is survived by his wife, Mary Corbett, a former dancer, and a daughter, Amanda. A son, David, died in a car accident in 1997.

• Frank Windsor, actor, born 12 July 1928; died 30 September 2020