FROM PARTICK TO HOLLYWOOD

Tributes as Scots-raised star of stage, TV and film Maurice Roëves dies at 83

Maurice Roëves. Actor. Born: 19 March, 1937 Died: July 14, 2020.

SCREEN tough guy Maurice Roëves was born in Sunderland but considered himself thoroughly Scottish, having been brought up in Partick in Glasgow from an early age. Among his most celebrated roles were Hitler in a BBC2 Playhouse presentation of The Journal of Bridget Hitler, Vincent Divers in the television musical drama Tutti Frutti and Colonel Edmund Munro in the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans.

As a teenager he harboured desires to train as an actor but found his ambition overtaken by events beyond his control and went into National Service where he completed training with the SAS instead. A former bingo caller on Blackpool’s Golden Mile, Roëves was eventually accepted at the RSAMD in Glasgow and cut his teeth as a contract player at the Citizens Theatre in 1964, having joined as acting assistant stage manager under the legendary Ian Cuthbertson.

He made his screen debut in 1966 in Dr Finlay’s Casebook but, after a series of character roles in TV and film, which peaked with Major Corcoran in The Eagle Has Landed, and Who Dares Wins, as Major Steele, he took off to have a crack at Hollywood.

The gamble paid off with respectable portfolio of motion picture credits, including Disney’s The Fighting Prince of Donegal, Richard Attenborough’s Oh What a Lovely War and John Huston’s likeable POW turkey Escape to Victory.

Roëves played character roles rather than leading parts but was rarely without work. His biggest TV earner when he posited his body Stateside was the $15,000 dollars per episode daytime soap opera part in Days of Our Lives. He played a Washington secret agent, Helpern, in a lengthy role he later quit to join the cast of John Byrne’s Tutti Frutti.

Sometimes he took his “acting” too far, continuing to relate to his characters off-screen. The part of Divers, the Majestics’ degenerate womanising guitarist, proved particularly problematic, as in Dr Jekyll having some considerable trouble in shaking off Mr Hyde.

He lamented: “My wife had a real tough time when Vinnie was in me. Her husband had disappeared. It’s the way I work.”

While working on Michael Mann’s Hawkeye picture he bonded with Wes Studi (Dances With Wolves), a native Cherokee Indian – though not main star Daniel Day Lewis, whom he dubbed as “precious”.

A close and meaningful friendship between Roëves and Studi that lasted to his death, it was an affinity rooted in a heated dispute on the Mohicans set, which flared up over the gruelling working conditions being imposed on the native tribesmen hired to play the Huron, Iroquois and Mohawk warriors in battle scenes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

The disagreement got so contentious that the production was perilously close to shutting down until Roëves acted as mediator between director Mann and the restless tribesmen led by Studi. It saved the picture and possibly Studi’s career.

As for Roëves, who has made a lifetime out of roles that play on a mean streak nearly the size of his considerable charm, he was in demand right up to the last. Proud to have played Lenny, the grandfather in this year’s five-part BBC thriller The Nest, starring Martin Compston, Roëves once said modestly of his craft: “I learn my lines and pray to God.”

His off-the-wall attitude went down a storm with directors. After the Hawkeye flick, he was catapulted from a big budget musket-and-flintlock costume epic and straight into the loony world of Rab C Nesbitt. Roëves was cast as Nesbitt’s nemesis, a Hannibal Lecter character with a clouded eye and leather mask.

But a prized starring role in another Scottish television classic was to slip unfortunately from his grasp. He was ready to sign up for the part of the leading cop in

Taggart, as successor to James Macpherson, when a sudden change at the top in the drama department put a spanner in the works. They opted for Alex Norton instead.

Dubbed Mr Grit, Roëves embraced his menacing hard man image. Gruff and bluff, he was not among the humblest actors but was always co-operative with directors and fellow cast members. Socially he enjoyed a good malt and had a habit-forming attraction to smoking foul-smelling Gauloise cigarettes which he quit after having half a cancerous lung removed in 2012.

His imperfect features nevertheless placed him in continued demand as a screen tough guy and he revelled in recounting his many Hollywood tales to rapt journalists. Though he kept a lively bee in his bonnet with film and TV critics, many of whom he accused of being “too lazy to bother” in putting an umlaut accent over the second syllable of his precious surname, which is of Prussian descent. Nonetheless he did appreciate one eminent writer’s description of his lived-in face, hewn from a wellsculptured chunk of granite, as “a bit like Elvis Presley and a bit like Dustin Hoffman… but the wrong bits.”

Maurice Roëves died after suffering a stroke. He is survived by his wife Vanessa and children Sarah, Alice, Christopher and Jonathan.