Pat Roach - Acting Career

Acting Career

He made his acting debut as the red-bearded bouncer in the Korova Milkbar in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Roach and Kubrick reunited for Barry Lyndon; Pat portrayed a hand-to-hand brawler named Toole, who engages Ryan O'Neal (as the title character) in bare-knuckle combat. Roach enjoyed considerable success via being typecast as muscle-bound supporting characters; these included the non-speaking role of Hephaestus in Clash of the Titans (coincidently, he later appeared as Atlas on "Jim Henson's The Storyteller": Greek Myths in the story of Perseus and the Gorgon, on which Clash of the Titans was based), a SPECTRE-backed assassin in Never Say Never Again, and a bandit-warlord in the sword-and-sorcery yarn Red Sonja. (The latter two pitted him against Sean Connery and Brigitte Nielsen, respectively, in mortal combat; Roach lost on both counts.) Perhaps most notable were his roles as the skull-helmeted General Kael in Willow, and as the Celtic chieftain in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. More sympathetically, in 1985 he played Petty Officer Edgar Evans in the Central TV mini-series The Last Place on Earth about Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole.

Roach appeared as several burly villains in the Indiana Jones series in the 1980s. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Roach played a Sherpa who fights Jones in a bar in Nepal and also a German mechanic who is killed by a propeller blade on an airstrip in Egypt. He thus had the rare opportunity to be killed twice in one film. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Roach was again killed twice, playing a Thuggee assassin who is hanged by Jones's bullwhip attached to a rotating ceiling fan and later a Thuggee overseer who is killed by a rock crusher while fighting Jones. His final appearance in the series was as a Gestapo officer in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; however, he appears only briefly, because his main fight scene with Jones was cut. The role of Colonel Dovchenko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) was a stand-in for Roach, who died in 2004.

Roach is best known to British audiences as Bomber — in the ITV/BBC comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet — a bricklayer who joined the main cast in Düsseldorf and appeared in all four series, but died before the final special was completed.