Richard Lynch is another of those Hollywood actors whose name you might not recognize. But once you see his face, you think, “Yeah! I know that guy!”

With Lynch, who died this week at his home in Palm Springs, California, there was another reason he was so memorable.

Some of the obits for Lynch, who was 76, note his scarred face. Some attribute it to injuries he suffered in an accident in the 1960s.

Whatever the cause of Lynch’s unusual looks, he used those, his Draco Malfoy-blond hair and his distinctive voice – a mixture of distinctive and gravelly – to make an impression on a generation of movie and TV fans.

For me, Lynch was best known for playing a vampire reborn in modern-day in the 1979 TV thriller “Vampire.” I didn’t know until I read his obits that the TV movie, which was made on the cheap but had an impressive cast and some nice visuals, was a pilot for a TV series. It would have been cool to see Lynch menacing the show’s heroes each week.

Lynch was also familiar to geeks for his role as the villain in the low-budget sword-and-sorcery flick “The Sword and the Sorcerer,” released in 1982.

He had an impressive TV resume that included guest appearances on shows ranging from “The Streets of San Francisco” to “The Bionic Woman” to “Starsky and Hutch” to “Galactica 1980” to “The Fall Guy.”

More recently he starred in a lot of low-budget horror films and appeared in the Rob Zombie “Halloween” remake.

Richard Lynch might not get included in the “In Memoriam” video shown at next year’s Academy Awards. But he’s the kind of memorable character actor that the movie and TV industry is built on.