Douglas Kidd

Douglas Kidd, born Douglas James Miller in Vancouver, Canada, made quite a splash when he came into the world. Weighing nearly 10 pounds at birth, he was the biggest baby in the Vancouver General Hospital. Kidd has Austrian, Irish, Scottish, Finnish and Norwegian ancestry. An all-around athlete growing up, Kidd excelled in football, wrestling, track & field, soccer and ice hockey, and was named Athlete of the Year in his senior year of high school. He always loved movies, but he never imagined acting in them until he watched Sylvester Stallone play Rocky (1976). That movie had a lasting impact on Kidd, as did the sequels Rocky II (1979) and Rocky III (1982). Rocky was a beacon of inspiration to Kidd while he trained for and competed in his sports, especially wrestling, and Stallone's performance led Kidd to study the work of other actors, including Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford and Robert De Niro. After graduating from high school, Kidd accepted a wrestling scholarship at Simon Fraser University. For two years he competed in tournaments in both Canada and the USA, and two of his teammates went on to win medals at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Then, while acquiring his final credits towards his Bachelor's Degree in English Literature, Kidd attended a performance of Peter Schaffer's play "Amadeus" at the Vancouver Playhouse as a requirement for one of his courses. He rushed into the theatre a few minutes before the play was about to begin and bumped into Hollywood actor Charles Martin Smith (The Untouchables, American Graffiti) in the lobby. That chance encounter, as well as how moved he was by the play, inspired Kidd to audition for his University's Theatre Program. For one of his two audition pieces he chose a monologue from "Amadeus", and his audition went so well that he was offered a spot in the second year of the University's three-year program. Around the same time, Sylvester Stallone came to Kidd's hometown to film the climactic fight scene in Rocky IV in a large Vancouver arena decorated to look like it was in Russia. Seeing an advertisement in a local newspaper that said they needed extras to play Russian boxing fans, Kidd went to the arena every day of the two-week shoot to try to get in the film. One day they were rounding up a small group of extras who were supposed to rush into the ring and surround Rocky after he defeats the Russian boxer, Ivan Drago. The extras had to remove their shoes so they wouldn't damage the canvas, and those wearing white socks were being turned away because only dark socks gave the appearance on film that they were still wearing shoes. When Kidd overheard that, he quickly convinced one of the film crew to lend to lend him a roll of black tape and hastily wrapped it around his own white socks. He slipped into the ring, passed inspection, and is standing screen-left of Stallone during Rocky's big speech at the end of the movie, Kidd's first appearance in film. After graduating from university Kidd spent a year in Montreal, performing in a couple of plays including a production of "The Dresser" for Imago Theatre. He then moved to Toronto and was cast in numerous other plays, chief among which was an outdoor production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" by renowned Director Lewis Baumander (who helped Keanu Reeves get his start), and a production of Agatha Christie's play "The Mousetrap" at the Toronto Truck Theatre, billed as "Canada's Longest Running Play", in which Kidd gave over 400 performances. Kidd also started to land roles in movies, playing the lead role in two low-budget feature films: the Canadian cult classic Psycho Pike (1992) and Psycho Scarecrow (1996). Roles in television followed soon thereafter, including a reserve officer in an episode of Top Cops (1992), a politician's loyal handler in The Hidden Room (1993), an egotistical socialite in Forever Knight (1995), and a television journalist in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues (1995), featuring David Carradine (Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2). In recent years, Kidd has played a determined FBI Agent in the television series The Art of More (2015), featuring Dennis Quaid and Carey Elwes; a mob-connected CEO in Trust No One (2016); a suspicious police officer in the thriller Awakening the Zodiac (2017), featuring Leslie Bibb; and a sleazy doorman at a sinister nightclub in She Never Died (2019).