Last night brought us some bad news, the passing actor Richard Hatch. Sci-fi fans will best know Hatch for his duel roles in the Battlestar Galactica series, having played key roles in both the original and the remake.
Richard Hatch was born in Santa Monica, California in 1945. He only had a passing interest in acting, preferring to instead work towards a career in pole vaulting. It was the assassination of President Kennedy that lead to him taking a new path was the shocking event forced him to confront powerful emotions and how to present them. It was seven years later that he booked a job as Phillip Brent in soap opera All My Children. Hatch worked this job for two years and made many guest appearances in shows such as The Waltons and Hawaii Five-0.
Hatch's first big role came in 1976 when he took the role of Insp. Dan Robbins in The Streets of New York after Michael Douglas departed the show. His most famous role (for geeks) came two years later with the cult sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica. He played Captain Apollo, a Viper pilot and the son of the Galactica's commander Adama. At the beginning of the series he's marked for his military successes and the personal loses he suffered as a result of the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies.
Although he was unable to appear in the series return Battlestar 1980 he maintained a fondness for the material and sought to revive the franchise, unsuccessfully, in the 1990s. When the series was reimagined in 2004 Hatch returned as Tom Zarek, a charismatic terrorist who spend decades as a prisoner on a ship now part of the human convoy. Over the course of the series Zarek becomes a political figure looking to gather power for himself.
Hatch has been a regular feature on our screen and at conventions since his break-out roles in the 1970s. He passed away on the 7th February 2017 as a result of pancreatic cancer.
Rest in Peace.
