Producer on World in Action

Leslie Woodhead spent his National Service learning Russian at the Joint Servies School for Linguists in Fife and then used his new-found skills listening in on Soviet radio messages. In My Life as a Spy the director recalls his contribution to the Cold War.

Leslie Woodhead worked at Granada Television for 28 years.
He turned freelance in 1989 and his since made many films for the BBC, mainly for the Storyville and Arena series.

Leslie Woodhead is a freelance television and film producer and director. During the 1970s, he pioneered the development of dramatized documentary on British television, specializing in investigative reconstructions of major East European stories. He made 10 films as producer or director for Granada Television's Disappearing World series in England, including documentaries on Africa, Nepal, the South Pacific and China. His two-hour special, Invasion, was the first British docudrama to be aired on American network television. From the mid-'80s, Woodhead developed a successful strand of dramatized documentaries with HBO in New York, a relationship he continues to this day.

Since leaving Granada in 1989 to pursue his own projects, Leslie Woodhead has directed major dramatized documentaries for the BBC and Granada Television, which were co-produced with HBO. These programs include a film about the downing of Pan Am flight 103 (Why Lockerbie? - An Investigation of an Air Disaster) and executive produced a film on the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Disaster at Valdez). Most recently he directed 444 Days, produced by Antelope Films for BBC2/The History Channel and the Terrence Malick-produced film Endurance for Walt Disney Pictures.

Leslie Woodhead is the author of A Box Full of Spirits, a book on his filmmaking in Africa, and is currently an Honorary Lecturer in visual anthropology at Manchester University in England.
His 1999 documentary A Cry From The Grave - an hour by hour account of the Srebrenica massacre - won awards at four film festivals.
Other films he has made for the BBC's Storyville include My Life As A Spy and Star Wars Dreams.
He lives in Cheshire.