While the sell-out run at the Traverse introduced the world to a raw new writing talent in John Tiffany's production, for Roeves, an even more significant moment came at the end of the play's run. That was when he and his partner, Veronica Rawlings-Jackson, tied the knot, with a civil ceremony that took place in the upstairs foyer of the Traverse itself.
"Vanessa and I knew each other years ago," says Roeves, "but I was having too good a time after my divorce [from Scots actor Jan Wilson], and she went off and got married, and that seemed to be that. Then, years later, I was doing a play in Kilburn, and she walked into the theatre. I recognised her, and things took their course. We were the first people to get married in the Traverse after the law changed."
A decade on, Roeves and Rawlings-Jackson are the joint driving force behind Roeves' solo turn in Just A Gigolo, a new play by Stephen Lowe based on the life of Angelo Ravagli, regarded by some as the inspiration for Mellors, the gamekeeper who conducts a cross-class affair with his titled mistress in DH Lawrence's scandalous novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. If in Lawrence's book Mellors reflected a mixture of both Ravagli and Lawrence, in real life, Ravagli conducted a long-term affair with Lawrence's aristocratic wife, Frieda von Richthofen, with the pair eventually marrying after Lawrence's death.
It was only after von Richtofen's death that Ravagli came into full possession of nine small paintings by Lawrence, which are still barred from being seen in public in the UK due to their apparent obscenity. It is this that forms the backdrop to Lowe's new play.
"Nobody's done anything on Mellors," Roeves says of Lawrence's fictional alter ego of Ravagli. "It was always about Lawrence and Frieda, but in a way Ravagli is more interesting. Stephen has written two other plays about Lawrence [Fox and the Little Vixens and Empty Bed Blues], so we went up to Taos in New Mexico, where my wife and I have a property, and I met a lady who was going to be a 100 years old the next day. She knew Frieda, as well as Ravagli, and I said to her, did he flirt with you, and she kind of blushed.
"He was quite a character, apparently. He was a great dancer, a painter, and full of mischief. He was apparently very good with his hands, and built a ranch. He did like the women a lot as well. He was nearly thrown out of the States because of what was described as his moral turpitude, so Frieda decided to marry him to keep him there. But the shadow of Lawrence was always there, and Ravagli was the one in the background, serving the wine and everything."
Now aged 75, after a career that took him from his native Sunderland to Hollywood via a Glasgow boyhood, Roeves remains most familiar in the UK for his role as over the hill rocker Vincent Diver in John Byrne's seminal 1980s TV drama, Tutti Frutti. In fact, Roeves' small-screen career dates back to the mid 1960s with guest roles in the original series of Dr Finlay's Casebook. With post Tutti Frutti cameos in Baywatch, Cheers and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Roeves also played a down at heel God in The Granton Star Cause, one section of the big-screen version of Irvine Welsh's book The Acid House and Chief Superintendent Duckenfield, the police chief at the centre of events recreated in Hillsborough, Jimmy McGovern's dramatisation of real events leading up to 96 football supporters being crushed to death in 1989.
More recently, Roeves' marriage has brought him even closer to home.
"My greatest memory is of doing pantomime at Glasgow Pavilion," Roeves says. "Afterwards, Jack Milroy and everyone was backstage, and they all gave me a big hug and said welcome to the club. That meant everything to me.
"But when I did that after doing Shakespeare and working for so long in Hollywood, someone said to me that my career must have been slipping. I said, b*******, it's an honour to be at the Pavilion, but that's what you come up against when you do work like that. It's a class system."
Roeves' first brush with theatre came after he left the army following his national service. He joined amateur drama clubs in Glasgow with the idea he might meet some girls, then realised he quite liked acting enough to take it seriously.
"One thing led to another, and I ended up at drama school, then went to the Citizens Theatre. I was on ten quid a week. That paid my rent, food, booze. That was all I needed."
If class snobbery is something Roeves recognises, it was also at the heart of both DH Lawrence's canon and Gagarin Way. The latter, about a group of disgruntled Fifers whose botched kidnap of an international industrialist, originally played by Roeves, provokes an ideological debate, is now considered a contemporary classic.
Following its Traverse run, Gagarin Way transferred to the National Theatre, although its run was cut short, possibly in light of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York that September.
In the last decade, Roeves has appeared in the likes of Hallam Foe, as well as guest-starring in Brian Elsley's high-octane teen drama Skins alongside fellow Gagarin Way actor Michael Nardone.
Outside of work, Roeves suffered a cancer scare which one might have expected to slow him down. For Roeves, however, such a close brush with death only seems to have fuelled his determination to live.
"I don't want to die yet," he says. "I enjoy living too much. The one lesson that nobody else teaches you is that when you're in your 60s, trying to handle old age is difficult. I learnt that five years ago when I had my cancer operation.
"I had half a lung taken out, and now I don't have cancer any more. I'm healthy, but I had to battle through it, and then I immediately got cast in The Damned United, and was running about a football field."
For the future, Roeves is happy to wait and see what happens with Just A Gigolo. It's already received a successful reading at a Lawrence symposium in Nottingham, and there is talk of it travelling beyond Edinburgh. If not, Roeves has a crazy notion of doing an improvised comedy act.
"It would be great to be a stand-up," he laughs. "You wouldn't write a script. You'd just sit in an old bath-chair and say, 'I'm your comic for the night,' then make things up.
"These are the crazy ideas you get. I suppose the older you get, you can't always be bothered, but you make yourself do it. Another thing you discover as you get older is that, even though you may be in your early 60s, and you're cast as someone in their 40s as I have, as soon as someone starts going on about your real age, you can lose work. But I've got to the age now where it doesn't matter. In a way it's an advantage and, to be honest, I don't feel any different now to when I was younger."
Maurice Roeves: Just A Gigolo, Assembly George Square, August 1-27, 3.20-4.30pm www.assemblyfestival.com
