Sam Kydd

Outlived by his wife by over 30 years, Lavender Kydd died on September 15th 2012 aged 97.

Belfast-born, he lived in England from aged 7. During his acting career, he specialised in playing irrepressible cockney characters and Irishmen. He in fact spoke RP (received pronunciation) as he'd been to Dunstable School. He had a great ear for accents and in many of his early films was a northerner, a west country man, Scots, and even eastern European. This facility with different characters worked superbly in the Televison sketch comedy he did in he 1950s.

His wife Pinkie was 1949 World Doubles Table Tennis Finalist.

Sam was a very well known, un-sung, British Actor from 1946 to his death in 1982. He was originally born in Northern Ireland but came over to London England as a boy with his mother and her brothers, setting up home in Bayswater, then Shepherd's Bush, then Chiswick. He was sent to Dunstable school. Before the Second World war he worked at Alvis Cars and Whiteley's Department Store in the bedding department but also entered Talent Contests as a stand up and impressionist. He got a job with the Oscar Rabin Band at the Hammersmith Palais as part of his 'Hot Shots' introducing the band's numbers, and telling a few gags and tap dancing in a few numbers.

Son of an army officer, he saw military action himself during World War II. Taken prisoner in Calais in 1940, he was interned in a POW camp in Poland for five years. There, he took charge of theatrical activities among the prisoners, writing and staging plays.

In 1939 at the start of the war, he was called up as he'd been very briefly in the Territorial Army. According to his autobiography, "Quick Mum He's on Now" he made over 240 films, many of the titles as yet unloaded to IMDb.