Colin Welland won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance as Mr Farthing in Kes and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for writing Chariots of Fire.
16 Facts About Colin Welland
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Colin Welland spent his earliest years in the Kensington district of Liverpool before moving to Newton-le-Willows in 1941.
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Colin Welland passed his eleven-plus in 1945 and attended Newton-le-Willows Grammar School, and, after his National Service, he studied at Goldsmiths College and Bretton Hall College of Education.
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Colin Welland gained a teaching diploma and qualified as a teacher, then taught art at Manchester Road Secondary Modern school in Leigh, where he was known as "Ted" because of his Teddy Boy curly hairstyle.
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Colin Welland began his stage career as an actor and assistant stage manager at Manchester Library Theatre.
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Colin Welland was a sympathetic schoolteacher in a BAFTA-winning performance in the film Kes, and a detective in the Richard Burton film Villain.
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Colin Welland was in the television series Cowboys, a comedy about a dodgy builder, with Roy Kinnear.
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Colin Welland co-presented Sport Two on BBC 2, with Ian Wooldridge, in the early 1970s.
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When Colin Welland appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1973 he said that most of his own plays "usually champion the individual against the system".
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Colin Welland married Patricia Sweeney in 1962, and they had a son and three daughters together.
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Colin Welland was a lifelong rugby league fan and player who wrote of his support for the sport in newspaper columns.
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Colin Welland stood up for rugby league against rugby union discrimination in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Colin Welland died in his sleep at a nursing home in Sunbury on Thames on 2 November 2015, at the age of 81.
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Colin Welland had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years before his death.
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On his death, Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam said Colin Welland was "an unswervingly good man; a fine actor, and a seriously gifted screenwriter".
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Colin Welland had a tremendous honesty about everything he wrote.