Kevin Howarth

British actor Kevin Howarth was born in Keresley, a village and civil parish of the city of Coventry in the county of Warwickshire, to his mother Betty Jeanetta Smith (née Gridley) and his father Peter William Walton Smith. The youngest of six children his mother died of cancer when Kevin was just one year old leaving him and his five older siblings to be raised on the home front by their paternal grandmother, Ada Smith (née Medforth), while their father brought in the money by working permanent night shifts as an engineer at the famous Jaguar Cars factory. He attended the Hill Farm Primary Schools in Coventry, where his first taste of acting in front of an audience was at the tender age of 6 playing a Chinaman in a school production. Many more school productions followed and a natural instinct for acting was exposed. He went on to attend the President Kennedy School (a coeducational secondary school and sixth form) where he felt constrained by the uninspiring curriculum of the then comprehensive style of education. He found solace outside school hours in the Air (Cadet) Training Corps (ATC), where he excelled in all aspects of their training and rigorous outdoor pursuits. This led him to seriously consider "joining up" in the military, but at the point of leaving school his father discouraged that idea and instead he found himself reluctantly manoeuvred into studying mechanical engineering and technology as an apprentice at Jaguar Cars. A year after completing this apprenticeship and feeling disillusioned, he took the timely offer of a small redundancy payment and left to seek new pastures. With no real direction and no plan, he then spent a number of years drifting from job to job, travelling, hitchhiking a lot and "partaking in much revelry", until he found himself based and working in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was here that a defining moment on an empty stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre spurred him on to become an actor. Within six months of this revelation he was offered a place at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and it was only thanks to a generous scholarship from the Warwickshire County Council that he was able to accept this offer.