Edward Woodward cemented his iconic status when he starred in British movie The Wicker Man, which has gone on to gain cult status over the years.

But at the age of seventy nine the actor has passed away from a series of illnesses, including pneumonia.

A young Woodward always dreamed of being an actor and attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). In 1946 he began his acting career on the stage, mainly as a Shakespearean actor up and down the country.

In 1955 he made his debut in London and went on to work on the likes of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in the West End.

He would go onto tread the boards on Broadway and down under in Australia.

By the mid fifties he was also juggling movie roles, making his debut in 1955 in Where There's A Will, an adaptation of R.F. Delderfields' play.

He appeared in the likes of Becket, Sitting Target and Hunted over the coming years but it's his 1973 role as devout Christian Police Sergeant Neil Howie for which he best remembered.

Sergeant Howie, a naive young police officer sent to Summerisle, a secluded island off the coast of Scotland, to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan. When he arrives there, he finds a very tight-knit community that is mistrustful and hostile to outsiders.

No one is willing to even acknowledge Rowan's disappearance. Soon, Howie begins to realize that the town might, in fact, be a strange pagan cult, one given to unbridled sexuality and possible human sacrifice.

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Seeking an audience with the oddly civilized Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), Howie hopes to get to the bottom of the mystery, but instead he finds something more shocking than he could have ever imagined.

But when it was released the movie only enjoyed mediocre success and it only the years since then that it has become the critical hit that it now is, today it is considered one of the best British horror movies of all time.

Other movie performances include Australian movie Breaker Morant, his performance brought the movie to worldwide recognition. And more recently he appeared in Hot Fuzz.

As well as making a name for himself on both the stage and the big screen Woodward also moved into television and during his career appearing in 2000 projects for the small screen.

He worked on the likes of American show The Equalizer, which followed a British former intelligence operative, running for four years in the eighties.

The actor has suffered two heart attacks and underwent a triple bypass surgery in 1996. In 2003 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The actor died at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro earlier today at the age of seventy nine. he is survived by wife Michele Dotrice and three children; Tim Woodward, Peter Woodward and Emily Beth.