British actor Kevin Howarth was born in Keresley, a village and civil parish of the city of Coventry in the county of Warwickshire, England, 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 worked 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 Comprehensive School, but he felt constrained by the uninspiring curriculum and found solace outside school hours in the Air (Cadet) Training Corps (ATC), where he excelled in all aspects of their training, sports 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 guided 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 voluntary redundancy and went off to seek new pastures. 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 at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre spurred him on to become an actor. Within six months he was offered a scholarship and a place at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He is best known for playing complex and dangerous leading roles; such as Max, the "smooth talking psychopath", in The Last Horror Movie (2003); Peter, the mentally disturbed drifter in Summer Scars (2007); and Viktor, the brutal and calculating brothel keeper in The Seasoning House (2012).