Warren Clarke

Born: April 26, 1947; Died: November 12, 2014.

WARREN Clarke, who died in his sleep after a short illness aged 67, became one of British television's biggest stars as the uncouth Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel in Dalziel and Pascoe, the highly popular police drama that ran for 12 series between 1996 and 2007.

Clarke was in his late forties and had amassed a long and impressive list of credits by then, including playing one of the main characters in Stanley Kubrick's highly controversial and very violent futuristic drama A Clockwork Orange way back in 1971.

He featured in such notable television dramas as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984). He played the irascible industrialist father of Miranda Richardson's character in Blackadder the Third (1987) and cropped up in the occasional big Hollywood movie.

Heavy-set and jowly, he was never likely to make a living as a Hollywood romantic lead however. He was confined to supporting roles for much of his career and sometimes struggled to find any work at all.

As late as 1989 when he was cast in the starring role in the prestigious BBC mini-series Nice Work, he had to borrow money while waiting for his pay to come through.

"I'd been out of work for a while before I started and was broke," he said in an interview three years ago. "I had to ask people to lend me money and my wife Michele actually flogged her engagement ring so we could feed ourselves. She didn't tell me because she didn't want to saddle me with worries."

In a way Nice Work provided the formula for future successes. He played the gruff, old-fashioned boss of an engineering company, opposite Haydn Gwynne's feminist, intellectual academic who has to shadow him to get more experience of "real life".

The odd couple idea was to prove a winner. In The Manageress (1989-90) he was a gruff football club chairman and Cherie Lunghi was a rather more sophisticated football club manager. And in Dalziel and Pascoe he was the old-school cop alongside Colin Buchanan's university-educated young pretender.

Clarke came from working-class Lancashire stock and to some extent his roles, certainly his later roles, reflected his own personality. He had little in the way of intellectual pretensions, was easily bored and did not suffer fools gladly.

He was born Alan James Clarke in Oldham in 1947. His mother worked as a secretary and his father made stained-glass windows for churches, including Coventry Cathedral. Clarke harboured early hopes of becoming a professional footballer, but he also acted at school and invented a list of credits to help secure his first role in professional theatre.

He was to play a 60-year-old man in a small-scale production, where he took responsibility for his own make-up, using self-raising flour to make his hair grey. "Under the lights the flour mixed with my sweat and turned to dough," he later recalled. "There were big lumps of it, all dripping down my face."

By the second half of the 1960s he was getting occasional work in television, including several small parts in Coronation Street. But Dim in A Clockwork Orange was by far and away the most important role in his early years.

Malcolm McDowell played the central character Alex, and Clarke was one of his gang or "droogs". Young delinquents in white boiler suits, bowler hats and make-up, they indulge in an orgy of violence, including kicking a tramp nearly to death to the song Singin' in the Rain.

Significantly, his character in A Clockwork Orange winds up as a policeman. Dim was just one of a number of heavies and thugs that Clarke would play, sometimes on one side of the law, sometimes on the other.

Clarke found the actual experience of making the film boring however. "It was supposed to last 12 weeks and it went on for a year," he said. "Stanley was all right. Well, he was insane, but he was all right with me. But it just went on too bloody long."

Clarke had a recurring role as a detective in Softly Softly (1973), he was Quasimodo in the BBC's 1976 adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1976) and a homosexual soldier, Corporal "Sophie" Dixon, in The Jewel in the Crown.

He also found the repetitive nature of theatre boring, though he appeared in Anthony Shaffer's play Murderer at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh in 1975 and subsequently in the London West End, playing a police sergeant.

He had supporting roles in several big movies, including Hawk the Slayer (1980), Clint Eastwood's Firefox (1982), the comedy Top Secret! (1984) and the big-budget flop Ishtar (1987), which starred Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. But Clarke found Hollywood films "a bit unreal" and tired of the endless delays and retakes.

Dalziel and Pascoe brought him fame and fortune late in his career. "I've worked nearly 50 years for this," he said. More recent credits include Red Riding (2009) and Just William (2010) and he had been working on a new version of Poldark.

His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife Michele, a son from his first marriage Rowan, who works in television, and a teenage daughter from the second marriage, Georgia.