Pat Roach, who has died of cancer aged 67, was the solid rock of the extraordinarily popular 1980s Central Televsion series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which followed the fortunes of a group of British building workers venturing abroad, initially to prosperous West Germany, to find employment. He played Brian "Bomber" Busbridge, older, wiser, hairier and - at 6ft 5in in his socks - a good deal bigger than his mates.
In fact, Roach was a former professional wrestler, though quiet and gentle in character - attributes which he brought to Bomber. As their worldly father-figure, he may have introduced the group to such novel foreign amenities as the brothel or the bidet, but when Oz (Jimmy Nail) and Dennis (Tim Healy) were at each other's throats, Roach would quell the shouting match with a few firm words.
He could, of course, turn on the villainy when required, and had a profitable sideline as the heavy in a number of big-screen films, including one James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again (1983), and, between 1981 and 1989, all three Indiana Jones epics. He unsuccessfully auditioned for the part of Darth Vader in Star Wars.
Roach was born in Birmingham, and never really left it. In later life, he ran a health club in the city. He also co-wrote two books - one on on his boyhood, If, and another on the city's canals and jewellery workshops, Pat Roach's Birmingham (2004).
He was trained as a wrestler by Alf Kent, and his first professional match was against George Selko. He went on to hold the British and European heavyweight championship. The poet and novelist Philip Oakes remembers him as particularly graceful in the ring, and once took Desmond Morris to see him fight, when the zoologist was working on his book about the animal roots of human conduct, The Naked Ape.
Roach is said to have been given his first acting role by Stanley Kubrick, in A Clockwork Orange (1971); the director certainly used him again in his costume movie Barry Lyndon (1975). There were also early television appearances in Hazell (1978), Minder (1979) and Juliet Bravo (1980).
The idea for Auf Wiedersehen, Pet was dreamed by the director Franc Roddam and written by the matchless Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. The first series was broadcast from the beginning of 1984, when Minder was still running. Both series recognised that humour was not something you could stick on, it was a way of seeing things. Written and performed with affection but honesty, they demonstrated that we still had television at its most appealing. A second series of 13 episodes followed in 1986, with the action shifting to Spain. It was to be 15 years before the format was revived again.
Perhaps the most important part Roach played was in 1985, between the two Auf Wiedersehen series, in Trevor Griffiths's The Last Place On Earth, a six-part dramatisation of Captain Scott's ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole ahead of his Norwegian rival, Amundsen.
Griffiths took his line from recent scholarship, which sought to demythologise the exploit; Scott and his officers were to be seen as stuffy and class-ridden compared with the Scandinavians. The snag was the presence a couple of rankers in Scott's team. Roach played one of them, Petty Officer Evans - and played him so well that the thrust of the story was deflected enough to allow Scott a kind of nobility.
Roach had contracted cancer by the time the idea of a single television film of Auf Wiedersehen was revived, with the lads heading, this time, for America. There were worries about his health during filming in 2002, but he was characteristically determined, and a fourth instalment was shot in Cuba and the Dominican Republic last year. A further two-parter has been in preparation, but he was too ill to take part.
· Patrick 'Pat' Roach, actor and wrestler, born May 19 1937; died July 17 2004