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Richard Lynch (12 February 194019 June 2012; age 72) was an actor from Brooklyn, New York who portrayed Arctus Baran in the Star Trek: The Next Generation seventh season episodes "Gambit, Part I" and "Gambit, Part II". He was the older brother of fellow Next Generation guest star Barry Lynch, who played DeSeve in the season six episode "Face Of The Enemy".

Lynch was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA. After several successful performances on the New York stage, in 1969 he was a member of a small troupe mounting a play at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Massachusetts, which had just hired Ron Perlman, aged 19, as a summer intern. In his autobiography Easy Street (The Hard Way), Perlman recalled witnessing Lynch's transformation into the actor's persona as "absolutely thrilling" and cited him as a long-time friend and inspiration; when Perlman was forced to quit his position after the death of his father, he recalled Lynch voicing his support for Perlman and his family.

Lynch made his feature film debut in Scarecrow (1973) and later appeared in over ninety film and television projects, many of which are in the science fiction/horror film genre. These include God Told Me To (1976), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982, with Anthony De Longis, Jeff Corey, George Murdock, and Jay Robinson), and Savage Dawn (1985, with Charles H. Hyman, Tim Culbertson, and Biff Yeager). In 1988, Lynch acted both in Eight Men Out (with John Anderson, Gordon Clapp, Christopher Lloyd, James Read, and Kevin Tighe) and Bad Dreams (with Harris Yulin, Julianna McCarthy, Randy Oglesby, Louis Giambalvo, Steven Anderson, Coleen Maloney, Tim Trella, and Tony Cecere). Other films he appeared in were Alligator II: The Mutation (1991, with Brock Peters), Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991, with Ian Abercrombie and Aron Eisenberg), Trancers II (1991, with Jeffrey Combs), and Necronomicon (1994, co-starring Jeffrey Combs, David Warner, Dennis Christopher, and Gary Graham). He portrayed Wolfe in the original Battlestar Galactica, the first Xaviar in Galactica 1980, and Count Iblis in Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming. He is the only actor to hold the distinction of appearing in Battlestar Galactica, Galactica 1980, and Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming.

Other credits include the pilot episode and third and fourth season episodes of Starsky & Hutch (starring David Soul), and further guest appearances on The Bionic Woman, Barnaby Jones (with Lee Meriwether), The A-Team (starring Dwight Schultz, Melinda Culea, William Lucking, and Lance LeGault), Murder, She Wrote (with William Windom), and T. J. Hooker, starring William Shatner, James Darren, and Richard Herd. He also appeared in the 1998 thriller Shattered Illusions with Leland Crooke and Spice Williams.

On 19 June 2012, Lynch was found dead in the kitchen of his home in Palm Springs, California. [1] According to his spokesperson Mike Baronas, who explained the details of his death in an official statement, one of Lynch's friends found Lynch dead on the kitchen floor of his home after not hearing from him for a few days. He is believed to have died from natural causes, as no investigation into the cause of his death was made.

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