ACTOR EDWARD Woodward, who died yesterday aged 79, found wealth, stardom and acclaim for starring in a series of tough-guy roles, be it as spies, soldiers, cops or as a score-settling private eye.
The actor enjoyed the distinction of starring in long-running TV series on both sides of the Atlantic – Callanand The Equalizer– together with a number of unforgettable film appearances.
Few who have seen it will forget the anguished final moments of the low-budget 1973 classic The Wicker Man, in which Woodward's well-meaning police sergeant is burned alive.
Yet Woodward was well into his career before he became a recognisable face. One of his most famous roles, as TV secret agent Callan, came 20 years after he had first begun treading the boards in provincial theatre.
And it was another two decades before he landed the small screen role that cemented his celebrity status as The Equalizer.
In the US, where the series was filmed, one magazine poll voted him “the male TV star more women would like to cuddle than any other”. He was labelled a sex symbol for his portrayal of the ice cool, but charming ex-CIA agent Robert McCall – a vigilante who operated his own one-man security service.
Edward Albert Arthur Woodward was born into a modest, working-class family in Croydon, Surrey. His father was a chicken farmer turned metal worker.
An only child, Woodward developed an early interest in acting at school, performing in plays and reciting passages of elocution.
At 16, after being dissuaded from early ambitions to become a journalist, he won a scholarship to Rada, where he stayed a year before going into rep. It was 10 years before his acting attracted notice, when he played the part of Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in 1958, and he was later flattered to be asked by his boyhood idol Sir Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre.
The 1960s also saw him take a stream of bit parts before landing the lead role in Callan from 1967 to 1972 (reprising the part for a film in 1974).
As the cool calculating Callan, in the Thames TV series, Woodward became the most famous spy on British television. His seedy MI5 character, the gaunt, working-class loner with the clipped, Cockney voice and a chip on his shoulder, was a smash hit. He starred in 64 episodes.
The following year, he starred in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Manas the fiercely Christian policeman Sgt Neil Howie who heads to a remote pagan Scottish island. His fruitless search for a missing girl stands out in a spectacularly odd and strangely hypnotic cult hit.
Woodward won further recognition in the title role of Breaker Morant(1980), a film about Australian horsemen fighting for the British during the Boer War.
In 1996, he had triple bypass surgery, and prostate cancer was diagnosed in 2003. Earlier this year, he appeared in BBC1's EastEnders.