Richard Hatch of 'Battlestar Galactica' dies at age 71

Richard Hatch, who played space heartthrob Captain Apollo on the original TV series Battlestar Galactica, has died. He was 71.

Hatch had been in hospice care for pancreatic cancer at the time of his death, TMZ reported Tuesday. His manager Michael Kaliski confirmed the news to Variety, saying, “I will always remember him fondly for his inspiring sense of youthful wonder, his boundless passion for creative expression, and his huge, kind heart.”

The American actor rose to fame playing a sci-fi icon during the late 1970s, but his first days of acting were in theater. He performed at the Los Angeles Repertory Theater and starred in several plays and musicals, before moving onto a career in film and television that would span over three decades.

On Tuesday, fans and comrades paid tribute to the actor across Twitter.

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Hatch's first venture into TV acting was on the long-running soap opera All My Children, while he made appearances on a wide range of classic TV shows, including Hawaii Five-O, The Love Boat and Dynasty. He landed the Battlestar Galactica role in 1978.

While he starred in some smaller film releases, it seems that Battlestar Galactica always held a special place in Hatch's heart. Throughout the 1990s, he wrote several novels based on the TV series and tried pitching for sequels to film execs for at least seven years -- an experience that left him feeling "exhausted and sick," as he told Sci-Fi Pulse in 2004.

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Eventually, the idea of a Battlestar Galactica remake -- not sequel -- would come to fruition during the early 2000s. While it wasn't the original idea Hatch had pitched, he came around after hearing more about it from screenwriter Ron Moore.

And with that, he would land a role on the same show he starred in two decades before.

“As Ron talked about the part, it didn’t take long for me to see that this was a role that I would love to play," he told Sci-Fi Pulse. "In a sense, I had been playing that role all my life, of fighting for the common person and helping people feel more empowered."