Leslie John Woodhead: – [Heath 1948–1956]

Leslie Woodhead died on , after a short illness. He was born in Glasgow on . Leslie’s father, Fred Woodhead, was a travelling dance band musician and moved the family to Halifax in Yorkshire when Leslie was eight to open a music shop at 22 Market Street. Leslie attended Heath Grammar School and got a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge to read English.

For his National Service commencing in 1956, he served in Fife at the Joint Services School for Linguists where he was taught Russian. He was posted to West Berlin to monitor the communications of Soviet pilots flying in and out of East Germany.

In 1961 he married Yvonne. They moved to Cheshire, where James was born in 1964 and Alison in 1965.

Leslie was one of Britain’s most distinguished documentary film makers, and winner of many international awards. He began his 40 year career at Granada Television in Manchester in 1961 as a graduate trainee. In his early days he shot the first ever film of the Beatles and covered the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park. He worked on the current affairs series World in Action and made 10 films for Granada’s Disappearing World series, including documentaries in Africa, Nepal, the South Pacific and China. His five films on the Mursi, a nomadic cattle herding people in South West Ethiopia (1974–1991), were awarded First Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1992.

In the 1970s Leslie pioneered drama documentary, specialising in investigative reconstructions of major East European stories. He created a Drama Documentary unit at Granada, which won the top award from the Royal Television Society.

In 1986 he won BAFTA’s Desmond Davies Award for his ‘Outstanding creative contribution to Television.’

After leaving Granada in 1989, Leslie worked on diverse subjects including the downing of PanAm 103, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and a trilogy of arts documentaries on Soviet themes for BBC2. His recent work includes critically-acclaimed documentaries about 9/11 and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. His Arena film Comrade Rockstar about American singer Dean Reed is being developed by Tom Hanks as a movie. He has also made music documentaries with Tony Bennett and Randy Newman, and about Ella Fitzgerald.

Endurance, Leslie's non-fiction feature film about Haile Gebrselassie, the Olympic Gold Medal long distance runner, shot in Ethiopia on Super 35mm, was released in US cinemas in May 1999.

Leslie was an Honorary Companion of Manchester University, an Honorary Lecturer in Visual Anthropology and a Doctor of Letters of Salford University. In 1994, he was awarded an OBE for Services to Television.

His wife Yvonne, children James and Alison, granddaughters Rosie and Lana and his many friends around the world will miss Leslie greatly. We will remember him as an extraordinary producer of films which opened up the world to people in pioneering ways, and as a genuinely humble and lovely human being.

This obituary draws on In memory of Leslie John Woodhead which also contains recent photographs of Leslie.

See also the Obituary by Anthony Hayward for The Guardian.