Simon Gipps-Kent (born Simon Trevor Kent; 25 October 1958 – 16 September 1987) was a prolific 20th-century English theatre and film actor in the 1970s–80s, noted for his teenage portrayals of British royalty and nobility. He was born into a show business family in Kensington, London. His television debut was on the BBC in 1971 followed with a London West End theatre debut in 1972. He continued to act on stage, film and television until the year before his death in 1987.
Early life and education
Simon Trevor Kent was born in London to Peter Gipps Kent, a variety artist, and Sonia (née Aebersold) Kent, a dancer. At age 12 he decided acting would be his career. As a youth he attended the Ladbroke Grove School in West London where he wrote, produced, directed and acted in his own play as a way of gaining recognition. Brought up as a Catholic, he attended the London Oratory School in Brompton from September 1970 to June 1974, moving to Cardinal Manning Roman Catholic Boys' School, also in London.
Theatre
Simon Gipps-Kent, as he would later call himself, had early experience on the British stage that, according to his talent agency listings, included alternately playing one of the royal children (either Prince Bertie or Prince Alfie) in I and Albert at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1972–73, and as Max-Ernst Von Kellig in A Lesson in Blood and Roses headlining with Ben Kingsley at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973. He appeared in the production Fantastic Fairground at the Young Vic in 1974, and a Young Vic tour of Macbeth, playing Fleance, in Mexico and Spain in 1975. Gipps-Kent played "Emmanuel" to Herbert Lom's Napoleon Bonaparte in William Douglas-Home's Betzi at the Haymarket Theatre and road tour in 1975. In 1976–77 he appeared in Where the Rainbow Ends at the Gardner Theatre, Brighton.
Gipps-Kent, in a 1979 newspaper interview headlined Simon's Problem Is Time, expressed his desire to move on to adult roles, including more Shakespeare, but in spite of his accumulated credentials to date, had been denied those opportunities. Due to his "boyish good looks and modest figure", he found himself playing younger characters than his real age, mostly on British television, for the majority of his career.
Gipps-Kent later returned to West End theatre work in the 1981 run of Romulus Linney's Childe Byron at the Young Vic with David Essex as Lord Byron. For five months in 1983 he appeared in the London Shakespeare Group's productions of Betrayal and Twelfth Night, which also played a short season at the Donmar Warehouse and toured extensively for the British Council in China, Japan and throughout the Far East, Middle East and Africa.
Gipps-Kent appeared in a Wyndham's Theatre stage and road tour production of Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ from 1984 to 1986 as the character "Barry Kent".
Television and films
Gipps-Kent's first television appearance was at age 13 in Philip Saville's 1971 O Fat White Woman for BBC's Play for Today, in a story by William Trevor of a teacher who takes pleasure in abusing his students. He returned to Play for Today in 1974 in After the Solo. He appeared as the bookworm orphan Peter Beresford in the 1972–73 BBC adaptation of Noel Streatfeild's 1970 children's book Thursday's Child. At age 15 he headlined as the preteen orphan Stephen in the BBC television adaptation of M. R. James' Lost Hearts, first broadcast on Christmas Day 1973, as part of the A Ghost Story for Christmas series and now preserved in the British Film Institute (BFI) collection.
In 1974 Gipps-Kent appeared in "The Doomsday Men" episodes of the children's science fiction television series The Tomorrow People, and played young Pip (to Michael York's adult Pip) in a made-for-TV retelling of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations for the Bell System Family Theatre, airing in the United States on 22 November 1974.
In 1974, in a film for the then Children's Film Foundation, he starred in The Firefighters as a "junior firefighter" accused of arson who must, with the aid of his younger brother and sister, prove his innocence and find the real arsonists before his court appearance. That production and the entire CFF archive are now curated by the BFI. Also in 1975, he appeared in Edward the Seventh, again portraying young Prince Edward ("Bertie"), this time for ITV. For a time he also played Kenton Archer in the BBC radio serial The Archers.
