Pat Roach

Pat Roach was a professional wrestler and martial artist from Birmingham who became British cinema's default large man for two decades. Six foot five and built accordingly, he was used by directors as furniture that could hit you: a mechanic, a guard, a chieftain, a demon.

Steven Spielberg cast him three times in the Indiana Jones films, and the Raiders of the Lost Ark mechanic is the one everybody remembers, a fistfight beside a spinning propeller that the film wins on physical presence alone. Temple of Doom made him the chief guard for the rock-crusher sequence, and The Last Crusade found room for him in a Gestapo uniform. He is General Kael in Willow, a helmeted warlord who barely speaks, and both Toth-Amon and the Man Ape in Conan the Destroyer, which is two henchmen for the price of one. He turns up as Hephaestus in Clash of the Titans, as Brytag in Red Sonja, and as a Bond heavy in Never Say Never Again. Kubrick got there before all of them, casting him in Barry Lyndon in 1975.

The screen villainy that made him known abroad was never the whole job. At home he was best known as Brian Busbridge, nicknamed Bomber, the West Country bricklayer in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a part that asked him to be gentle and let him be funny. He died in 2004.