Douglas Kidd
Actor Douglas Kidd was born Douglas James Miller in Vancouver, Canada. He has Austrian, Czech, Irish, Scottish, Finnish, French and Swedish ancestry, and is known for playing clever and often wealthy men.
An all-around athlete growing up, Kidd excelled at football, wrestling, track & field, soccer, and ice hockey. In his final year at Windsor High School in North Vancouver he was named "Athlete of the Year", won a silver medal at the British Columbia High School Wrestling Championships, and played the title role in a class production of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth".
Kidd was awarded a wrestling scholarship at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and competed at tournaments in Canada and the USA during his first two years. Then, while completing a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature, Kidd attended a production of Peter Schaffer's play "Amadeus" at the Vancouver Playhouse as a course requirement. Hurrying through the lobby just a few minutes before the curtain went up, Kidd ran into actor Charles Martin Smith (The Untouchables, American Graffiti), and the event inspired Kidd to audition for SFU's Theatre Program. He performed a monologue from "Amadeus" as part of his audition and was invited to join the three-year program.
After graduating from SFU, Kidd spent a year performing plays in Montreal, including a production of Ronald Harwood's "The Dresser" for Imago Theatre. Relocating to Toronto, he found more work on stage, including an outdoor production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" by Director Lewis Baumander (who directed Keanu Reeves in "Hamlet" and "Romeo & Juliet"), and acted in over 400 performances of Agatha Christie's play "The Mousetrap" at the Toronto Truck Theatre (billed as "Canada's Longest Running Show"). Kidd also played the title role in "Colonel Quackery's Truly Fabulous Leisure Travelling Sideshow", singing, dancing, and making kids laugh at hundreds of schools across Ontario. In order to play the latter role, Kidd gave up his role as lead singer for The Fringe, a rock band he had auditioned for and performed with live at Toronto nightclubs like the El Mocambo (where The Rolling Stones had once infamously recorded a live album).
Kidd also began to get cast in movies, playing the lead role in two low-budget feature films: the Canadian cult classic Psycho Pike (1992), and Psycho Scarecrow (1996), which features a scene in which he performs one of his own original songs. Roles in television followed as well, including a New Orleans reserve officer in an episode of Top Cops (1992), a politician's loyal handler in The Hidden Room (1993), a German reporter in Family Passions (1993), an egotistical socialite in Forever Knight (1995), and a French TV journalist in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1995), featuring David Carradine (Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2).
Recently, Kidd has played a determined FBI Agent in the television series The Art of More (2015), featuring Dennis Quaid and Carey Elwes; a suspicious police officer in the thriller Awakening the Zodiac (2017), featuring Leslie Bibb; a threatening doorman at a nightclub in She Never Died (2019); and a Russian mobster in Gutshot (2022).