Warren Clarke appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and BBC drama Dalziel and Pascoe. Photo: PA WireWarren Clarke, whose gruff northern accent was familiar to millions who watched him play the taciturn Superintendent Andy Dalziel in the popular BBC drama Dalziel and Pascoe, died at 67 after what was said to be a short illness.
The Oldham-born actor played the surly copper for 61 episodes, providing the yin to the yang provided by Colin Buchanan’s Peter Pascoe.
Born into a poor Lancashire family, he worked hard to achieve fame, telling the Daily Mail in 2011 that he was very lucky.
He told the paper that before one television series, 1989’s Nice Work, he had to ask friends for money and his wife Michelle had to sell her engagement ring to buy food.
A 20-something Clarke appeared alongside Malcolm McDowell as Dim, a half-witted yet violently evil ‘droog’ in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 dystopian masterpiece A Clockwork Orange, based on Anthony Burgess’s novel.
After several court cases implicated the film’s brutal violence, including the murder of a tramp in an underpass by a gang featuring McDowell and Clarke’s characters, Kubrick withdrew the film from cinemas and it remained rarely shown until its re-release following his death in 1999.
With appearances in Coronation Street and The Avengers already under his belt Clarke went on to appear in numerous television series and films in a wide variety of roles.
Clarke went on to appear in numerous television series
They included a Russian dissident opposite Clint Eastwood in 1982 Cold War thriller Firefox, a violent football hooligan in 1995’s British cult classic ID, and a nouveau-riche, pig-obsessed northern Regency industrialist opposite Rowan Atkinson and Miranda Richardson in Blackadder the Third in 1987.
Other brief television appearances included Lovejoy, All Creatures Great and Small and The Onedin Line. He was also known for his starring role in BBC series Down To Earth, about a family who leave the rat race to relocate to rural Devon.
But it was Dalziel and Pascoe which made him a household name. He starred as the ageing, gritty detective in the TV adaptation of Reginald Hill’s stories about the chalk-and-cheese colleagues for 12 series from 1996 until its conclusion in 2007.
In his 2011 Daily Mail interview he said: “I got lucky with some of the things I did and happened to make bigger money.
“But I’ve never gone into anything thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to make a fortune here’. I want to see the script, the character. I’ve been offered stuff in Hollywood but it was stuff I didn’t want to be involved with. I find all that stuff over there a bit unreal and a bit false.”
More recent work included a BBC adaptation of Bleak House nine years ago and Channel 4’s gritty Red Riding trilogy in 2009.
The last role he completed before his death was as Charles Poldark in a BBC revival of the 1970s TV drama Poldark.