PH Moriarty, who has died aged 86 after suffering from dementia, came late to acting as he approached 40, but made an indelible impression, most chillingly in two British gangster films. The simmering menace he brought to the screen led one critic to observe that he could “make Hannibal Lecter look like Noddy”.
Distinctive for his moustache, smart grey suit and tie, he was ever present in The Long Good Friday (1980) as Razors, henchman to Bob Hoskins’s brutal underworld property developer, Harold Shand, who seeks to build his empire through the regeneration of London’s Docklands. Moriarty is seen driving Hoskins around on a quest to discover who is threatening this ambition (it turns out to be the IRA).
After placing the barrel of a pistol in the ear of a police informer interrogated by Shand (played by Paul Barber), Razors reveals the source of his nickname. As he lifts his shirt to display endless scars on his torso, patched up by what he describes as “65 inches of stitching”, Hoskins says he is known as “the human spirograph”.
Picking up a machete, Razors tells Barber: “Now you’re going to feel what it’s like, boy.” Several slashes follow in what proves to be just one of the violent scenes that, combined with Barrie Keeffe’s intelligent script, made The Long Good Friday a high-water mark in the history of British gangster films. Moriarty is also alongside Hoskins when rival gang bosses are suspended upside down on meathooks in an abattoir.
The film set him on a career largely typecast playing such characters, but on both sides of the law. “A guy in America saw it just after it came out, rang me up, the next thing, I was over there and starring in Jaws 3-D,” said Moriarty, who played the cockney sidekick to Simon MacCorkindale’s British oceanographer and photographer in that 1983 film.
At the end of the following decade, he appeared in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), the writer-director Guy Ritchie’s acclaimed gangsters and gamblers drama, as “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale, a porn seller who bludgeons his enemies to death. When a criminal played by Nick Moran loses £500,000 in a card game rigged by Harry, he is given a week to pay up.
The agent Simon Drew said of Moriarty: “The actor in him could make you fear for your life. If you knew him, the scowl quickly changed to a wry smile.”
Paul Hugh Moriarty was born in Deptford, south London, the son of William Moriarty, a lorry driver, and his wife, Mary (nee Griffin). On leaving St Joseph’s Roman Catholic school at 15, he trained as a cooper at the Admiralty’s victualling yard for six years – while boxing as an amateur – before becoming a stevedore at Surrey docks, Rotherhithe, where he lost the sight of his left eye in an accident.
When the TV producer Tony Garnett was filming there for a 1978 episode of Law & Order, Moriarty’s brother-in-law, GF Newman – the writer of the gritty four-part drama questioning the judicial system – suggested him for a part. As a result, he played a prisoner in the final episode and, as there was already an actor called Paul Moriarty, he took the professional name PH Moriarty.
He was then cast as a pub bartender in the cult mods and rockers film Quadrophenia (1979) before growing a beard for the big-screen version of the banned TV play Scum (1979) to play Hunt, the borstal warder checking in Ray Winstone’s young offender in a manner that suggests the staff are as unpleasant as the inmates. “You have heard of us, Carlin, aye?” he asks as his colleague roughs up the teenager, who has assaulted an officer at a previous institution.
In a similar vein, Moriarty played one of the prison warders giving a beating to Jimmy Boyle in A Sense of Freedom (1981), based on the Glaswegian gangland murderer’s autobiography.
He became a regular on television and was clearly cast to type when he was credited as “Evil Jim Dalton” in a 1990 episode of The Paradise Club. Later, he brought menace to the Sci-Fi Channel series Dune (2000) and its sequel, Children of Dune (2003), as Gurney Halleck, a character distinctive for a whip wound on his jawline. The producers saw that the scar, combined with the actor’s damaged eye, made his face incredibly expressive, angry and sad at the same time.
Moriarty’s later films included Evil Never Dies (2014) and Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins (2021).
In 1961, Moriarty married Margaret Newman. She, their son, Mark, and daughter, Kathleen, survive him. Another son, Neil, died at three days old.
• PH (Paul Hugh) Moriarty, actor, born 23 September 1938; died 2 February 2025
