As a teenager he was an amateur actor, before going to Trinidad where he worked first as a sugar farmer, but having decided that his father's life of plantation farming wasn't for him, he found employment as assistant stage manager and compere of calypso shows for tourists. After returning to England he spent a year at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, and was then hired as a stage manager at the King’s Theatre in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.