Lloyd Reckord

Lloyd Reckord (26 May 1929 – 8 July 2015) was a Jamaican actor, film maker, and stage director who lived in England for some years. His brother was the dramatist Barry Reckord.

Lloyd Malcolm Reckord was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 26 May 1929. He began his theatrical career with the Little Theatre Movement (LTM) pantomime at Ward Theatre. As reported by Michael Reckord in the Jamaica Gleaner, "Reckord's first big role was as Tobias in a production of Tobias and the Angel at the Garrison Theatre, Up Park Camp, when he was in his late teens.

Fired from his job at his uncle's hardware store because he insisted that he had to leave early to play his role in the LTM pantomime, Alice In Wonderland, Lloyd left Jamaica in 1951 when he was 21 to join his brother Barry, also a playwright and actor, in England." He auditioned and was accepted as a student at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, subsequently joining the Old Vic Company in London. He would also study theatre in the US, years later, at Howard University, Yale University and the American Theatre Wing.

Reckord appeared in the Ted Willis play Hot Summer Night at the New Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London in 1958, with Andrée Melly as his white girlfriend; a later Armchair Theatre adaptation the following year concentrated on the couple's relationship.

Reckord participated in the earliest known example of an interracial kiss on television, in You in Your Small Corner. a Granada Play of the Week broadcast in June 1962, in which he kissed actor Elizabeth MacLennan. This claim had earlier been made for Emergency – Ward 10, which post-dates Reckord and MacLennan's kiss. The play was written by Reckord's brother Barry, and directed by Claude Whatham.

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