Chariots of Fire - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[beth]

Theatrical movie debut of Nicholas Farrell (Aubrey Montague).

[melinda]

Surprisingly, neither Jackson Scholz nor Charles Paddock was a member of the U.S. gold medal winning 4x100m relay team. Eric Liddell was not a member of the British 4x100m relay team, either.

[chad]

Derek Pringle, who played the Captain of the Cambridge University athletics team, was a professional cricketer with Essex and played for England. He is now a cricket journalist.

[javier]

The film takes place in 1919, 1924 and 1978.

[ruby]

Born "Colin Williams" on July 4, 1934, in Leigh, near Manchester, England. Because Colin as a child showed early talent in drawing and painting, his father wanted him to become an art teacher. "I wanted to go on the stage, you see, but my dad had his feet firmly on the ground," Welland said on the BBC radio show "Desert Island Discs" in 1973. "He said, be an art teacher first, and if you don't like that, then go on to the stage. So, that's what I did." Welland joined a theater company in Manchester, changing his last name Williams to Welland, and in the late 1960s appeared on British television shows. His big break as a "Colin Welland" movie actor was playing the role of a teacher in Kes (1969), for which he won a British Academy Film Award. He played a Reverend in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971). Welland wrote stage plays and for several television series in the late 1960s and 1970s. In his Oscar speech, he thanked "Briish television, where I learned my craft." Following this movie, he received writing credits on Twice in a Lifetime (1985), A Dry White Season (1989), and War of the Buttons (1994). He had acting roles into the late 1990s. Colin (Williams) Welland, 81, died November 2, 2015, suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years. He is survived by his wife Patricia, four children, and six grandchildren.