THE gala night of Southend Film Festival is supposed to be an upbeat occasion, but what will the presence of special guest, PH Moriarty, do to the mood?

If the effect is anything like the man’s on-screen roles, audiences will be hiding under their seats.

Moriarty, 72, is responsible for creating two of the bloodiest screen characters in British movies: Hatchet Harry in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Razors, in the Long Good Friday.

Both men are named after their weapon of choice, and their readiness to use them, and both make Hannibal Lecter look like Noddy.

Yet like many actors who specialise in heavies and monsters, in person he is an amiable and warm-hearted family man.

Known to everyone as PH, to distinguish him from another actor, Paul Moriarty, he is more likely to buy you a bag of popcorn than dump you off Southend Pier in a concrete waistcoat.

Two reasons bring Moriarty, a Londoner, to Southend. One is the 30th anniversary of the British crime classic chosen for the gala night special screening.

In the Long Good Friday, he plays Bob Hoskins's henchman. “It’s the film that made all the difference to my career,” he says. “After Long Good Friday, I was never really out of work.”

The other is his fondness for Southend, which he has known since childhood. “My memories of the place are so good,” he says. “I used to come here with my mates when I was in my teens, and it will be good to be back here again with other old mates, guys I’ve worked with over the years, like Ray Winstone.”

Born and raised in Deptford, he first discovered Southend at the age of nine.

He recalls: “My dad was a truck driver and the first time I saw Southend, I was in the cab of this big old flat-nosed truck where the engine came up into the cab.

“We drove along the seafront, and it was magic. The sea, the pier, the smells. All that space. It was just something so new, after living in Deptford.”

The memories of those sights and smells haunted him. Some years later, they inspired what, despite all the action films he has made, he still calls “one of the big adventures of my life”.

He and his brother set out from Deptford to ride to Southend on their bikes.

“I was a Boy Scout and I’d been taught to show initiative, so I did,” he says. “They were just old bikes we had built from bits and pieces, but they did the job.”

The pair crossed the Thames at Greenwich, then set off down what Moriarty still calls the Southend Arterial Road, now better known as the A127.

He says: “We got terrible sunburn and were in dreadful trouble when we got home, but I’ll never forget that fantastic day.”

Jump another four years, and trips to Southend had become a regular event for Moriarty and his mates. He say: “There was a big crowd of us, 17 and 18-year-olds.”

Among them were Kenny Lynch, who went on to become a celebrated singer and actor. In that young crowd, too, was John Daly, who became a film producer, backing Oliver Stone’s Platoon and James Cameron’s the Terminator.

“There were other places, of course, like Margate and Brighton,” says Moriarty. “But there was just more fun to be had in Southend. I was into girls by then, of course, and the girls were always best in Southend. Brighton didn’t have the girls, and it didn’t have anywhere like the Kursaal, of course. There was also a place I remember where you could ride horses. I enjoyed that, cos I’d learned to ride with totters’ horses back home.”

After leaving school, Moriarty did the most normal thing for a Deptford man, and found a job in the Surrey docks.

He was working there as a longshoreman when he was discovered by producer Tony Garnett, who was filming an episode of the series Law and Order in the dockland area. Moriarty says: “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you do some acting, you’ll enjoy it”.

As predicted, the Surrey docker turned out to be a natural. “The camera was good to me,” he says.

He went on to play supporting parts in Quadrophenia, also showing at the Southend Film Festival, and Scum, but it was the Long Good Friday which propelled him close to the top of casting lists.

“A guy in America saw it just after it came out, rang me up, and the next thing I was over there and starring in Jaws 3D. I’d been in a few films before, but that was the one that changed it all.”

While filming the Long Good Friday, he forged another link with Southend, in the shape of the female lead, Helen Mirren.

“She was a stunning woman, Helen, absolutely lovely. And a great girl. She was just one of the boys, putting back the pints with everyone. We were filming down the docks.

“She asked me if I could get her into the canteen at the docks. Now I had to explain to her that nobody – nobody – who didn’t work on the docks ever went into that canteen. It just didn’t happen. But she managed it somehow, and they just took her in, like she was one of their own.

“Like I said, the girls from Southend were just the best.”