Tim Woodward
Tim Woodward is an actor, born 1953.
Generals, superintendents, governors, admirals, air chief marshals. Tim Woodward's filmography reads as a roster of men who outrank whoever the film is actually about. Born in London in 1953, he worked steadily for five decades across British television and international features, and by the end of it he had become the definitive example of a specific type: the authority figure who is not the villain, just immovable.
He was good at it because he refused to soften. As Superintendent Cummings in Legend, the Governor of Holloway in Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, Air Chief Marshal Harris in Fleming and Jack Warner in RKO 281, he played institutional power as bored, tired and entirely certain, which is far more unnerving than menace. American action films used him for the same weight, in London Has Fallen, Criminal and K-19: The Widowmaker, where the uniform simply changed nationality.
Television was where the range showed. He turns up as a headmaster in Absolutely Fabulous, in Vanity Fair, in Bramwell, in Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, in Rosemary & Thyme and Any Human Heart, taking the sort of parts that keep a working actor working for forty years without ever making him a name. Credits were still arriving at the end of the 2010s. Woodward died in 2023.
Movies (16)
- Legend (2015)
- London Has Fallen (2016)
- Criminal (2016)
- K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
- The Scarlet Letter (1995)
- David (1997)
- King David (1985)
- RKO 281 (1999)
- The Marine 6: Close Quarters (2018)
- Beast (2018)
- Some Mother's Son (1996)
- MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis (1994)
- Flight of Fury (2007)
- Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman (2005)
- B. Monkey (1999)
- Clapham Junction (2007)
TV (11)
Where to start with Tim Woodward
Start with Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman. It is the best film he is in, and his scenes carry the argument: the Governor of Holloway is a man administering something appalling with perfect politeness, which is exactly the note Woodward owned.
Legend is the most-seen version of the same idea, a police superintendent circling the Krays. RKO 281 is the sleeper, because playing Jack Warner in a film about studio power is a chance to be genuinely enjoyable rather than merely solid, and he takes it.
At the popcorn end, London Has Fallen and Criminal give you the late-career uniform roles, while K-19: The Widowmaker puts him in a Soviet one instead. Absolutely Fabulous is the outlier worth hunting down, because he is funny in it, which almost nothing else on the list ever asked of him.