Dennis Waterman, who has died suddenly aged 74, was such a familiar face on television for more than 40 years, playing similar sorts of streetwise characters, that it is hard to imagine that he was once a child actor in Hollywood and appeared in the opening season of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960. He also featured on the West End stage – in 1961, he led the first act closing number in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man at the Adelphi theatre.
He is indelibly associated with two of the most successful television series of all time, both shown on ITV: The Sweeney (four series, 1975-78), co-starring with John Thaw as members of the flying squad branch of the Metropolitan police tackling violent crime and armed robbery; and Minder (1979-1994, with two extended breaks in the overall 10 series), playing the hapless gofer and bodyguard Terry McCann to George Cole’s dodgy wheeler-dealer Arthur Daley.
