Richard was born in Swaziland (now named Eswatini) in Africa, but visited Britain every three years with his parents, which is how he first came to see Oliver! in a London cinema at the age of 12.
“It made an extraordinary impression on me, because it had child actors in it,” he told Radio Times.
“As somebody who wanted to be an actor secretly, seeing Mark Lester and Jack Wild was a very concentrated moment of understanding that you could become an actor, and still be young.”
However, he recalled that at the time his dreams of becoming an actor were “completely fantastical and ludicrous”, partly due to where he lived but also because of his heavy drinking government administrator father.
