Samuel John Kydd (15 February 1915 – 26 March 1982) was a British actor. He appeared in more than 290 films, more than any other British actor, including 119 between 1946 and 1952.
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.
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Early life and career
An army officer's son, Kydd was born on 15 February 1915 in Belfast, Ireland. He moved to London as a child. He was educated at Dunstable School in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. During the mid-1930s Kydd entered various talent contests and was spotted by Oscar Rabin who made him an MC for the Oscar Rabin Band and one of his "Hot Shots".
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 and bartered with them illegally, on one occasion spending a month in solitary confinement on bread and water. He caught tuberculosis.