Actor Warren Clarke has died at the age of 67. Clarke became an increasingly familiar face on British TV in the 1980s, and was probably best known in America as the lumbering, working-class police detective Andy Dalziel, a role he played from 1996 to 2007 in the popular crime series Dalziel And Pascoe. But moviegoers first noticed him when he played a character who started out on the other side of the law: Dim the droog, Malcolm McDowell’s heavyset, slow-witted sidekick in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
McDowell’s Alex calls Dim a “mindless, grinning bulldog,” and Clarke’s jowly visage served him well in other roles such as Winston Churchill, whom he played in the 1974 miniseries Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill. 27 years later, he played the older Churchill in Ben Brown’s play, Three Days In May.
Clarke had been acting on the stage and on TV, in television plays and the venerable British soap opera Coronation Street, for five years before Stanley Kubrick cast him in A Clockwork Orange. His performance as Dim led to offers from Hollywood, but Clarke turned them down, feeling that he had meatier opportunities closer to home. After a filmed version of Antony And Cleopatra, starring and directed by Charlton Heston, his next movie was O Lucky Man! (1973), which also starred Malcolm McDowell; it was directed by Lindsay Anderson, with whom Clarke had worked on the 1971 Royal Court Theatre production of David Storey’s play The Changing Room.