Carol Reed was the second son of stage actor, dramatics teacher, and impresario founder of the Royal School of Dramatic Arts Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Reed was one of six illegitimate children of Tree with Beatrice Mae Pinney, who Tree established in a second household apart from his married life. There were no social scars here; Reed grew up in well a mannered middle class atmosphere. His public school days were at Kings School, Canterbury, and he was only to glad to push on with the idea of following father and become an actor. His mother wanted no such thing and shipped him off to Massachusetts in 1922, where his older brother resided on of all things a chicken ranch.It was a wasted six months before Reed was back and joined a stage company of Dame Sybil Thorndike, making his stage debut in 1924. He forthwith met British writer Edgar Wallace, who cashed in on his constant output of thrillers by establishing a road troupe to do stage adaptations of them. Reed was in three of these, also working as an assistant stage manager. Wallace became chairman of the newly formed British Lion Film Corporation in 1927, and Reed followed to become his personal assistant. As such, he began learning the film trade by assisting in supervising the filmed adaptations of Wallaces works. This was essentially his day job. At night he continued stage acting and managing. It was something of a relief when Wallace past on in 1932; Reed decided to drop the stage for film and joined historic Ealing Studios as dialog director for Associated Talking Pictures under Basil Dean.Reed rose from dialog director to secondunit director and assistant director in record time, his first solo directorship being the adventure Midshipman Easy 1935. This and his subsequent effort, Laburnum Grove 1936, attracted high praise from future collaborator, novelistcritic Graham Greene , who said that once Reed gets the right script, he will prove far more than efficient. But Reed would endure the sort of staid, boilerplate film making that characterized British B movies until he left this behind with The Stars Look Down 1940, his second film with Michael Redgrave, and his openly Hitchcockian Night Train to Munich 1940, a comedythriller with Rex Harrison. It has often been seen as sequel to Hitchcocks The Lady Vanishes 1938 with the same screenwriters and comedy relief Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who would just about make careers as the cricket zealots Charters and Caldicott, from Vanishes.

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