Acting career
Roach made his acting debut as the red-bearded bouncer in the Korova Milkbar in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. He worked on another Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon, where he played a hand-to-hand brawler named Toole who engages Redmond Barry in a fistfight. Roach went on to play a number of strongman supporting character roles in films in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, including the non-speaking role of Hephaestus in Clash of the Titans.
Pat cameoed as a SPECTRE assassin in the non–Eon produced James Bond film Never Say Never Again, and as the bandit-warlord Lord Brytag in the sword-and-sorcery film Red Sonja. He appeared as the skull-helmeted General Kael in the film Willow, the evil wizard Thoth-Amon in Conan the Destroyer, and the Celtic chieftain in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
In 1985, he played Petty Officer Edgar Evans in the Central TV serial The Last Place on Earth about Captain Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the South Pole. Roach was turned down for the part of Darth Vader in Star Wars; however, its director, George Lucas, subsequently cast him as several burly villains in the Indiana Jones film series in the 1980s. In Raiders of the Lost Ark he played two roles, the first being a giant Sherpa who fights Jones in the bar in Nepal, the second a German Luftwaffe mechanic who fistfights with Jones before being killed by an aircraft's propeller blades on the airstrip in Egypt. In the next film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Roach played the Thuggee guard overseer in a mine who fights with Jones before being killed in a rock crusher. His final appearance in the series was as a Gestapo officer in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he appears only briefly because the character's fight with Jones was cut — the director, Steven Spielberg, considered the scene otherwise "too long" for a subplot.
On television Roach played the down-to-earth and easygoing Brian "Bomber" Busbridge in the long-running comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. He appeared in all four series, but was absent from the final two-part Christmas special. He was a guest on Central TV's Bullseye game show in 1984, and appeared in season 11, episode 39 ("Swan Song"), of The Bill, playing the character Reg Warren.
