Remember the bare-chested, bald-headed German mechanic who swapped bare-knuckle punches with Indiana Jones beside the desert airplane in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That was Pat Roach. And remember the giant Indian guard who fought Indy atop a conveyor belt on a one-way trip into the jaws of a rock-crusher in Temple of Doom? Pat Roach. How about Lippe, who battled Sean Connery's James Bond through the corridors of a health farm in Never Say Never Again? And the wizard Thoth-Amon who dueled Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Destroyer?

The list is not quite endless, but 6'6" Patrick Roach has made a substantial impact on the lives of modern movie heroes.

Prior to his Willow quest, Roach duked it out with a frantic Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The latest cinematic adventure for the 45-year-old actor from Birmingham, England, is Willow, directed by Ron (Cocoon) Howard (STARLOG #97). "They've been very good to me. Willow is my third movie for George Lucas," Roach notes. Set in a visually breathtaking fantasy world, Willow is the story of a Nelwyn (Warwick Davis), who leaves home on a vital, hazardous mission in a world dominated by the much larger Daikini. Roach plays one of the biggest of the big people (naturally), General Kael, right-hand man to the evil Queen Bavmorda.

Sitting in his office at the health club he owns, Roach recalls that his first Lucasfilm role was the result of a contact he made when working on the 1975 Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. "David Tomblin [STARLOG #86], who was the first assistant director, helped me get the job in Raiders," Roach says. "David, who is a very nice guy, has helped my career a great deal. I owe a lot to him. Having said that, I'm a very honest person when I work: I work very hard, I always give my best, and he recognized that because he guided me into one or two parts."

Cast by director Steven Spielberg as the Sherpa who fights Indy in Marion's burning bar, Roach's first Raiders scene was shot in the studio in London. But, the Sherpa's flaming demise--when Indy smashes him against a massive wooden table--was almost Roach's last scene.

"We ran through it a couple of times, and sure enough, the tables broke, and it looked good. But on the take, the table didn't break, and I did," Roach recalls. "It knocked me out, and I was on fire. I was supposed to wait as long as I could and then shout, and they were to put me out, but of course, I was unconscious. Billy Horrigan realized that I was, and he ran on set--in front of the camera--and put me out. So, I owe Billy." An experienced stuntman, Horrigan has also doubled for Roach.

Next, the actor was asked if he would like to meet a second death at Indy's hands. "I got the Sherpa first, and then Steven said to David Tomblin, 'You know, this guy could play the mechanic.' He said, 'Do you speak German?' I said [rapidly], 'Ja, bist dim jeder, ja, ja, Hanover ferfiedliesch feier munuch,' and he went, 'Ah, you do speak German.' 'Ja' That was all I could say."

Those few words sufficed and Roach got the part of Otto the mechanic, but first he had to lose his hair and get to Tunisia. "I had a local guy here in Birmingham shave it off for me, and I had to get a local policeman who I knew to sign my passport to say that it was me," Roach relates.

(Picture quality is adversely affected by presence of center crease and text.)

In Tunisia, the circling plane which served as the background (and final winner) of the Indy-mechanic brawl was as fearsome as it looked on screen.

"The propeller was on both our minds. This propeller was quite dangerous, it would have just cut me to pieces," Roach says. "In fact, we were fighting old-fashioned style, with the left arm well pushed out. As I turned around, I had to pull this arm in, otherwise, it would have chopped my hand off. We were both concerned about that, and we were trying to watch this moving plane--rolling in between the wheels, watching each other, trying to throw punches--bearing in mind that I was relying on Harrison to tell me when to turn. The camera was on him at the time, so he had to do it in such a way that the camera wouldn't pick it up. It was quite an ordeal."

Nor were their efforts entirely successful. "The plane actually went over Harrison's leg at one time, he was that busy watching me," Roach says.

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Roach ruled the underground work force as the head guard, "the guy who was quite capable of whipping the kids.

"Tom Smith did the makeup," Roach explains, "and it was so good that when I came downstairs for the first time, one of the Indians in the movie said to me, 'Where are you from?', and I said, 'Birmingham.' He said, 'No, no, no, I mean originally,' and I said, 'Birmingham.' He said, 'No, where in India?' That's how good the makeup was."

Filming his Temple of Doom scenes at England's Elstree Studios held its own surprises for Roach. "There was a whipping scene where Harrison's tied up to a rock. Barbra Streisand came in, dressed in black leather, and while Harrison was tied up to the rock, she took my whip off me and whipped him! She said, 'That's for Hanover Street, the worst movie I ever saw!' and then she whipped him for doing Star Wars and earning all that money. Then, Carrie Fisher ran in--she was dressed up, too--and she threw herself across Harrison, and shouted, 'No, no, no!' And then [Empire Strikes Back director] Irvin Kershner ran in and said, 'Steven, is this the way you run your movies? I would never let this happen on one of my sets!' Then, Steven said to Kersh, 'Get off my set!'

"They filmed it, and I think they sent it back to Hollywood. It was hilarious."

Roach has nothing but admiration for the man who plays his persistent adversary, Indiana Jones. "One can imagine that by now Harrison Ford and I have swapped many hundreds--or thousands--of punches. Not only have we done this fight scene, on three different occasions and under these foul conditions, but we actually hit each other so many times. Don't forget it's all bare fists, so if you catch someone, it's knuckles to jaw and it's quite nasty. We swapped many a blow for real unintentionally, and I must say that Harrison Ford is a super star, and a super person, because he never, ever, ever complained. On Temple of Doom, he had that terrible bad back as well. He went away, had an operation on it, came back, continued the fight, and never complained.

"The only thing he ever complained about was my breath one night because I had had curry."

When Pat Roach fights in a movie, he's not just acting. The staged movie fights benefit from years of Roach's experience with the real thing. "I used to wrestle and box in the fairgrounds many years ago," he recalls.

In their pursuit of Willow, Kael (Roach) and the Nockmaar soldiers lay waste to everything in their path.

Prior to acting, Roach made a living in several fields of physical endeavor. "I've always wrestled professionally, and I taught judo for six years," he says. "I went away to learn the wrestling profession on a shoestring and traveled extensively wrestling, merely to survive and to try to learn the business, rather than to earn a great deal of money.

"Apart from that, I've always been an entrepreneur-type person, and worked in salvage, and I have my own salvage company at the moment. Company motto: "If it moves, buy it. If it doesn't, sell the damn thing.' So, we buy and sell anything. That's the sort of thing I've always done."

Roach continues to pursue his parallel careers even while acting. "I have this health club which functions well; I still wrestle professionally, although I don't travel so much. I get offered plays from time to time, but I have to put my time into my health club. I find that very often it isn't lucrative enough for me to go away on a season for a play, and leave this [business] alone. Obviously, movies and TV pay much more money."

Roach first became involved in the film industry in 1970. "Stanley Kubrick gave me my first break in movies, in A Clockwork Orange," the actor recalls. "I presume he saw me wrestling on television, and thought, 'He would do for a particular character,' and asked for me. I don't know, I didn't ask him at the time."

Based on the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange depicts a world of urban and social disintegration, focusing on an anarchic gang of teenage hoodlums led by Alex, portrayed by Malcolm McDowell (STARLOG #74). "I played one of the bouncers in the bar," Roach says. "It was a couple of weeks work. It was my first, and your first is always the thing you remember. The funny thing is, that to jump into the movie industry with a man like Kubrick was quite a thing to do, and the next thing I did, he gave me lines to do. I had never done a line in my life; never been to a training school, nothing, and suddenly there I am with a script. He asked me to play a character called Tool, in Barry Lyndon."

Adapted from the novel by the 19th century writer William Makepeace Thackeray, Barry Lyndon concerns the exploits of the title character after absconding from the army, including becoming a card sharp and a spy, marrying into wealth and squandering it all. "Tool was the company sergeant-major, and he bullied Barry Lyndon, who was played by Ryan O'Neal," Roach explains. "They are at loggerheads throughout the film, and they finish up having a fight, one of the good old bare-fisted fights."

For Roach, it was a lesson in what makes for a good cinematic--rather than real--fight. "For the final blow, Ryan O'Neal measured me up, and he actually hit me--crack!--and down I went, and thought, 'Blimey!' Through my inexperience in the movie business, I thought to myself, 'Wow, I hope they print that.' But of course, it's not the take they used, because when Ryan hit me, it didn't look good enough; it looked like he missed me, and I went down like a lump of lead."

After Barry Lyndon, Roach's acting career lapsed for several years. "I hadn't got an agent, and I hadn't got a clue," he says. "The Walt Disney movie came along, The Spaceman and King Arthur. Maude Spector cast me for that, and I didn't know what I was doing in those days. I did my own deal for a week, and finished up four-and-a-half months on the film. I got embarassed by the checks that kept coming."

The reason for the delay in filming was simple. "It rained every day," Roach says. "It cost them a fortune. Disney was just so good to work for, they paid all our expenses." Derived from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the movie was about "a spaceman who went through a time-warp and came down to Earth in the time of King Arthur. I played Olaf, Merlin's assistant."

Next, Roach didn't appear in 1980's Flash Gordon. "Funnily enough, I auditioned for that, won two parts in the movie, got paid, and never actually got called to film," he remembers. "That was my first experience with Dino De Laurentiis."

Maintaining his nice guy image, Pat Roach returned once more to bedevil Indiana Jones (Ford), when unexpected guests invaded the Temple of Doom.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has become a modern movie classic, but the other production Roach worked on that year, Clash of the Titans--although noted for Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation contribution--has not.

"In Clash, I played Hephaestus, the guy who made the magic owl," Roach says. "Again, that was very interesting for me. There you are playing with Laurence Olivier, Ursula Andress, Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith, Jack Gwillim, an old Shakespearean actor, and Susan Harris, a terrific actresss, and the list just goes on. A super cast, and there I was thrown in as one of the gods.

"I had a great deal of fun in that movie. Ursula Andress and I used to check each other eating our cream cakes, and things like that, because she's very health-conscious, obviously; and Olivier at the time was quite ill. I used to give him my Vitamin E, and he used to lean up against me and say to me, 'Let me gather some of your strength, dear boy.' I found Olivier a lovely man. Tried to help me out and include me in shots and that sort of thing, which is nice."

Roach once again benefitted from his association with David Tomblin for his next movie, Never Say Never Again, which featured Sean Connery's return as 007. "David took me into the office and said to Irvin Kershner [the film's director, STARLOG #79], 'Kersh, I would like to introduce you to Lippe,' and Kersh said 'Yeah!' and I got the job.

"It was the health club scene, where Bond's pumping iron, and I pull the pin on him. In fact, I have the original machine in my gym; I bought the machine afterwards. We get many people who are very interested in it. So, every now and again, I go and pull the pin on somebody and guillotine them."

In Superman III, Roach portrayed one half of Superman in the battle royale between the evil Kal-El and Clark Kent. "I didn't do everything," he notes. "They needed another double at times. In one particular scene, when his heat vision cut the power magnet, and the magnet hit me and drove me into the ground, Superman then had to pick me up in his arms, and walk me across to a conveyer belt, which is something like 30 yards. I weighed 19 [stone] eight, 19 nine at the time [One stone is equal to 14 lbs.]. You just can't pick a guy up [who weighs that] and hold him and just casually walk anywhere. So, they used a 10-stone double and did a long shot on it."

After Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Roach renewed his relationship with the De Laurentiis family, accepting a job from producer Raffaella De Laurentiis (STARLOG #88). "I played three parts in Conan the Destroyer," the actor reveals. "I played the evil wizard who lived in a crystal palace [Thoth-Amon]. When Conan finally got to the crystal palace, I then turned into this half-ape man, which required five-and-a-half hours makeup [designed by Carlo Rambaldi].

"We worked what they call French hours: I was in the chair at 6:30 a.m., and no one else turned up till 12. When the mask went on, at 8:30, I had already had two or three spoonfuls of scrambled egg, and that was the last I ate all day, [although] I used to sip water through a straw, to avoid dehydration. They had built a dressing room on the set, and all through the day, they would take me into it and just leave me there. I used to just sit there, and no one would talk to me because I was in this awful, awful outfit.

Roach (bottom) is a professional wrestler when he's not on screen hurting someone.

"So, I did five-and-a-half hours makeup for about three weeks in one outfit. The wizard took three-and-a-half hours because of that eye. Then, when I thought all this making up was all over, I got asked to do the monster [Dagoth], in that outfit. It was a giant lizard-type monster with a big horn. It took eight people to get me into it, and once in it, it took eight people to work it.

"I actually wore an astronaut suit in that monster suit, to save me from dehydrating. Also, I used to have a doctor on call all the time, they used to feed me oxygen, and of course, I actually fought both times with Arnold Schwarzenegger [STARLOG #82, 88, 126]. It's bad enough trying to move him around anyway, but when you're in a suit of latex rubber! It was quite an ordeal."

Roach has no ego problems playing roles in which his face won't be seen, behind masks or heavy makeup. "Everything is a challenge, isn't it?" he comments. "I wouldn't rather do them anonymously, but it's good that they put you in two or three parts in a movie, and people don't realize that it's all the same guy. Apart from which, it's good to show a production office your versatility."

He enjoyed working with his co-actors on Conan the Destroyer. "Arnold is a darling, he really is. We trained together as well, and of course, Dolph Lundgren [STARLOG #123] trained with Grace Jones [STARLOG #95], Arnold and me. We spent a great deal of time together and trained twice a day, at 5 a.m., and again at 8 p.m. Arnold was the sort of guy who, if someone was in the gym and they were in trouble, he would go across and help them. He's a very naturally nice person, unspoiled by his success, he certainly was in those days. Very unspoiled."

As Brytag, keeper of the gate-key, Roach reunited with Schwarzenegger and Raffaella De Laurentiis in Red Sonja. "That was in Rome, at Churubusco Studios, and again we all used to train together every day, do our swordfighting routines," he recalls.

"I've worked a great deal in many of these movies with Vic Armstrong, who is a stunt coordinator and arranger. Vic Armstrong must be amongst the best stunt coordinators in the world. It seems that every premiere movie I've been fortunate enough to work on, he has been there. And he has helped me. When they needed somebody for Red Sonja, I think that he probably said, 'What about Pat Roach for this? He can do the job, he can do the physical side.'

"The thing is, these films are very demanding physically, apart from the dialogue which one has to deliver anyway. People keep telling me--I don't know how true it is--that there aren't many big guys who can do both. I suppose it must be true to some extent because I keep getting jobs."

Roach's latest job is in Willow, opening this month. "General Kael is the Queen's right-hand man. I suppose he is the villain in the film," the actor says.

After his Willow work, Pat Roach looks forward to going another round with that intrepid archeologist when the bell rings for Indy III.

In a fantasy world, there are no planes, trains or automobiles, so the bad guy gets around on the time-honored cinematic equivalent: a horse. "I became a master horseman in three days," Roach smiles. "I had ridden a horse before, but Greg Powell, who was the horsemaster, got me riding at full gallop, pulling a sword, within a week. We had lots of preparation with Greg, because he used to have us down riding, galloping, and switching horses around, trying to find a horse to suit us."

On location in New Zealand, Roach was overwhelmed by the scale of the filmmaking spectacle. "They scraped every horse in New Zealand up. Unbelievable. They had some of the biggest battle scenes that one will ever see: many, many hundreds of horses."

The location was chosen to serve the movie's fantasy theme. "We could never understand why they took us all the way over to New Zealand," Roach remembers. "What was the matter with Norway? But once we got there, we could see why. The amount of money they spent, which was phenomenal I imagine, will be well justified, because of how good it is. The scenes were so beautiful, the lake scenes. They even cut a lake out once. They put a back matte on it because you just get sick of seeing these beautiful lakes. Some of the scenery was magnifico."

But New Zealand also showed Roach that uniquely pictorial locations can be extremely inaccessible. "We were taken up to the shoot in helicopters," he grumbles. "I hate the damn things. The last day of the shoot, I travelled for two hours rather than 10 minutes in a helicopter. I said, 'Look, is there any room in that car?' They said, 'Yes.' 'I'll come with you.' I just don't like helicopters. They're bloody dangerous things."

For Willow, Roach's foreboding visage was enhanced with a hairpiece and protruding forehead, courtesy of prosthetic makeup expert Nick Dudman. "The first time it took a couple of hours," the actor says, "but he got it down to about 45 minutes in the end." This was reduced even more in scenes where Kael's animal-skull battle-helmet was down, obscuring his face.

Out of makeup, the formidable actor is often recognized in the street, though usually for his role in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, a British TV series about expatriate construction workers in Germany and Spain. "In New Zealand, for instance, I couldn't move! And I got mobbed in Gibraltar." In his home town, however, the glamour factor has worn off. "People are fed up of seeing me in Birmingham," he says. "They're not taking so much notice of me."