Tim Woodward, who has died of cancer aged 70, was an actor well suited to authority roles – detectives, doctors and magistrates – and made his biggest impression when he starred on television as RAF officers in two dramas, Wings and Piece of Cake, set in wartime.

Ironically, in his younger days Woodward had rebelled against Officer Training Corps sessions at Haileybury school and persuaded his parents – the actors Edward Woodward and Venetia Barrett – to take him out of school before he could be expelled.

But Woodward had modified his views slightly by the time he found fame. “I’m a member of CND, but that doesn’t imply I’m a pacifist,” he said in 1988. “Sometimes, one needs to fight for justice and freedom. I’m not interested in the jingoistic attitude towards patriotism, but I love my country just as much as the next man.”

He shot to fame in Wings (1977-78) in the lead role of 2nd Lieutenant Alan Farmer, a blacksmith turned fighter pilot serving in the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war. It gave Woodward the chance to take to the skies in a Tiger Moth. At one point Alan was believed dead after being shot down over France, but by the second series, he had been promoted to sergeant, resented by other officers because of his class and by NCOs for his promotion. When Woodward took one of his three motorcycles to Dublin and broke his leg in “a little accident”, his injury was written into the story, with Alan shot in the leg.

A decade later, the actor was donning flying goggles again to play the charismatic but arrogant Squadron Leader Rex in Piece of Cake (1988). Based on Derek Robinson’s novel about the fictitious Hornet squadron, it covered the first year of the second world war up to the Battle of Britain in 1940. “He brings the squadron together into an effective unit,” said Woodward of his character.

A lack of airworthy Hurricanes, the plane that had featured in the book, meant that Spitfires were used on screen. This time, they were piloted by the former Red Arrows display team leader Ray Hanna and others, although Woodward and fellow cast members simulated flight in a rig spinning round and round, and upside down. “It was strange – very like a hangover!” he recalled. “It’s not easy trying to remember your lines upside down.”

As Wings had done, Piece of Cake portrayed the problems of class divisions and snobbery as the pilots sat through the “phoney war” in France until German bombing hit western Europe.

There was class friction again in the 1987 drama series A Killing on the Exchange, in which Woodward starred as John Field, a comprehensive-educated British merchant banker competing with an American billionaire’s son for a top job.

Starring roles subsequently eluded Woodward, but he became a prolific character actor across British television channels.

He was born in London, the first child of Venetia (nee Collett), who acted under the name Barrett, and Edward Woodward.

Like his siblings, Peter and Sarah, Tim followed his parents into acting. He spent two years as an assistant stage manager at Richmond theatre, Surrey, then trained at Rada. While there, he successfully screen-tested in Italy with Liza Minnelli for a film to be directed by Franco Zeffirelli that was never made. He briefly returned to Rada but left before his final term to join the Citizens theatre company in Glasgow.

He made his screen debut – directed by Joseph Losey – in the film Galileo (1975) as the young noble Ludovico Marsili, one of the scientist and philosopher’s students. In the same year, in a BBC adaptation of Arnold Wesker’s play Chips With Everything, he was Pip Thompson, the national service RAF conscript and privately educated idealist wanting to avoid officer training.

After Wings, Woodward had good starring roles in two miniseries: a 1982 TV version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cousin Phillis, as Edward Holdsworth, a railway engineer competing for the love of the clergyman-farmer’s daughter of the title; and The File on Jill Hatch, a 1983 racial drama, as a police officer facing misconduct charges after helping his black American niece during the Brixton riots.

Later, he played a detective in Murder City (2004-06); the US army interrogator John Amen in the drama-documentary series Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial (2006); the husband of a woman who dies in a car crash with another man in Without You (2011); Musker, the department store’s financial backer, in the first series of Mr Selfridge (2013); a corrupt police officer in Mad Dogs (2011-13); and Sir Marion Carew in Jekyll and Hyde (2015).

In soap operas, he played John Thompson – an accountant taking charge of his missing brother’s affairs – in the first year of Families (1990-91) and a bishop for a short run in the second Crossroads revival (2003).

Woodward, his son Sam and his father teamed up to play three generations of a gangster family in The Bill in 2008. He had previously appeared alongside his father in a 1989 episode of The Equalizer.

His other film roles included Felix Young in The Europeans (1979).

In 1997, Woodward married Amanda Smith. She and their three children, May, Gabriel and Dylan, survive him, along with Sam, his son from an earlier relationship, with the actor Jan Chappell, Sybil, his daughter from a relationship with Kate Barnwell, and his brother and sister.

• Timothy Oliver Woodward, actor, born 24 April 1953; died 9 November 2023