Sam Kydd

Samuel John Kydd (15 February 1915 – 26 March 1982) was a British actor. His best-known roles were in two major British television series of the 1960s, as the smuggler Orlando O'Connor in Crane and its sequel Orlando. He also played a recurring character in Coronation Street. Kydd's first film was The Captive Heart (1946), in which he played a POW. He made over 290 films, more than any other British actor, including 119 between 1946 and 1952.

An army officer's son, Kydd was born on 15 February 1915 in Belfast, Ireland, and moved to London as a child. He was educated at Dunstable School in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. During the mid-1930s Kydd was an MC for the Oscar Rabin Band and one of his "Hot Shots". He would warm up audiences with jokes, impressions (Maurice Chevalier was a favourite) and tap dance routines before introducing the singers and attractions on the bill. During the late 1930s he joined the Territorial Army serving with the Queen Victoria's Rifles and when war broke out he was called up for active service.

Early in the Second World War, he went to France with the British Expeditionary Force but was quickly captured, spending the rest of the war in Stalag XX-A, a camp in Toruń in German-occupied Poland. Kydd later wrote of his experiences as a POW in his autobiographical book For You the War Is Over. While held in a forced labour subcamp in Wyrzysk, he learned various Polish phrases through contact with the local Polish population.

During his internment in the German prisoner-of-war camp, where he remained for the next five years, he took command of the camp's theatrical activities - devising and staging plays. He felt so strongly about his work there that, when he was offered repatriation after three years, he turned it down to continue with his theatrical work. In recognition of his valuable services during these years, he was awarded a pair of drama masks, made by the Red Cross from barbed wire.

Returning to Britain after the war, Kydd auditioned for the film The Captive Heart, which was about life in a prison camp, and as this was an area where he had much experience, he got a part as an advisor cum actor. He went on to appear in more than 290 films and 1,000 TV plays and series, including such films as The Blue Lamp, Father Brown, The 39 Steps and I'm All Right Jack. He often played the part of a strong and resilient cockney. He is best remembered as a character actor in films such as Chance of a Lifetime, The Cruel Sea, Sink the Bismarck!, The Yangtse Incident, Reach for the Sky, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Too Many Crooks, Smokescreen, Island of Terror, Too Late the Hero, Eye of the Needle and Steptoe and Son Ride Again.[10] He also appeared in the big-screen versions of Dad's Army and Till Death Us Do Part.

In 1963, Kydd appeared as the lovable smuggler Orlando O'Connor in Crane starring Patrick Allen as a Briton who moved to Morocco to run a cafe and had an aversion to smuggling.[11][12] The programme ran for 39 episodes and was watched each week by over 16 million viewers. Sam's character was so popular that when Crane finished he was given his own programme, Orlando, a children's adventure series which ran for 126 episodes.

He also appeared on TV in The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Pickwick Papers, Mess Mates, Arthur Askey, Benny Hill, Charlie Drake, Harry Worth, The Expert, Dixon of Dock Green,[13] Fossett Saga, Curry and Chips, The Tony Hancock Show, Minder, Crossroads, Coronation Street (playing the part of Mike Baldwin's father, Frankie), The Eric Sykes Show, and Follyfoot.[14]

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1974 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews.[citation needed ]

He married Pinkie Barnes, an ex-international table tennis champion (she was World Doubles Finalist in 1948) and one of Britain's first women advertising copywriters.[15] Their son, Jonathan Kydd, followed his father into the acting profession.[16]

Sam Kydd died of emphysema on 26 March 1982, aged 67. His son Jonathan Kydd reported that his father smoked up to 80 cigarettes a day, and he has edited 4 volumes of his father’s memoirs, the first of which is 'Be a Good Boy Sam' 1945-52