Colin Welland

Died: November 3, 2015

COLIN Welland, who has died 81, rose from the ranks of jobbing television actor in the early 1960s to become a major figure in the British film industry in the 1970s and 1980s, famously, and rather pompously, declaring "The British are coming" when he won an Oscar for best original screenplay for Chariots of Fire in 1982.

The film, which told the story of the rivalry between Harold Abrahams and the Scot Eric Liddell in the 1920s, shot largely in Scotland and did much to promote the country's tourism industry, particularly St Andrews, where the iconic opening scene of barefoot runners on the beach was shot.

But the declaration that the British were coming was a little premature. Producer David Puttnam was given charge of Columbia Pictures, but his tenure was brief and controversial. Director Hugh Hudson had a spectacular flop with the big-budget historical drama Revolution (1985).

And Welland's own American debut Twice in a Lifetime (1985) arguably fared even worse as no one really noticed it at all. He had only two more scripts filmed after that. But Welland had already made his mark on British film history by then anyway.

He learned the business as an actor in the early 1960s on the police drama series Z-Cars, part of a talented ensemble cast that included Stafford Johns, Frank Windsor and Brian Blessed, and went on to play a sympathetic teacher in Kes (1969), Ken Loach's film about a working-class English teenager's devotion to a kestrel.

But Welland was already spending much of his time writing scripts for the one-off drama slots that were a feature of British television schedules at the time, such as Play for Today. In 1971 he collected BAFTAs for best supporting actor for Kes and for best television script for his work on several plays. A decade later he was at the Oscars announcing that the British were coming.

Born Colin Williams in Leigh in Lancashire in 1934, he trained and worked as an art teacher before Z-Cars gave him his break as an actor. Set in a fictional new town in Merseyside, it brought a new realism to British television police dramas.

The producers wanted "real people" as the cops and Welland fitted the bill, playing the big, friendly, curly haired PC David Graham in almost 100 episodes between 1962-65. "I started as an actor in Z-Cars, which was written by the best writers and had the best directors – Ken Loach directed episodes – and they were live, so the scripts had to work," he wrote in 2001.

He regarded it as a wonderful education and from his earliest days was considering how to develop his career as a writer. "I started on half-hour plays, moved to 50-minute plays, and ended up writing 90-minute plays, by which point I was fully equipped to write a movie."

His first feature film as a writer was Yanks (1979), with Richard Gere as an American serviceman stationed in England during the Second World War and Vanessa Redgrave as a local whose husband is at sea.

It was David Puttnam who came up with the initial idea for Chariots of Fire. While ill and stuck at home, he whiled away the time with a history of the Olympics and came across the story of the two British gold medallists, both outsiders, one Jewish and the other a Scot who refused to compete on Sundays on religious grounds.

Impressed by Yanks, he commissioned Welland to write a script and Welland worked on it for a year, beginning with meticulous research. He advertised for anyone with memories of the 1924 Olympics to contact him and turned in draft after draft before both men were satisfied.

Many regarded it as too British and too old-fashioned, both in setting and attitudes, to succeed internationally. "When we showed it at Twickenham, a Hollywood producer left after ten minutes, came back at the end and said that they wouldn't have anything to do with it," said Welland.

"The attitude was that the average American would hate it, but I remember standing outside a movie house in New York when two little Jewish ladies came up to me and said: 'Is this the movie about the Gentile and the Jewish boy who run? Is it any good?' I told them it was terrific. 'This guy says it's terrific, let's go in,' they said. These were the average Americans the producer had been talking about."

Welland was living in the US at the time of the Oscars, in a small town in Washington State, working on the script for an American version of his TV play Kisses at Fifty (1973), in which Bill Maynard was a middle-aged married man, who begins a relationship with a younger woman.

Apparently whenever he walked into his local bar, the customers would greet him with the cry of "The British are coming," recalling Paul Revere's warning about British troops during the American War of Independence.

Of course none of that was terribly obvious at the time of the Oscars and Welland's declaration would rank alongside Sally Field's "You like me, you really like me," and James Cameron's self-coronation as "King of the World", as one of the great Oscar ceremony misfires.

Kisses at Fifty became Twice in a Lifetime, with Gene Hackman replacing Bill Maynard, after which Welland had two more scripts made, A Dry White Season (1989), about the injustices of apartheid, with Marlon Brando, and War of the Buttons (1994), a family film that reunited him with producer David Puttnam.

He also accepted occasional acting roles and was a regular in the comedy series Cowboys (1980-81), with Roy Kinnear and David Kelly.

He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and is survived by his wife Patricia, to whom he was married for more than 50 years, and their four children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH