WILSON IRVING, REGINALD STEPHEN (known as Wilson Irving) (1912– 1994), actor, radio broadcaster, television executive, and philanthropist, was born on 2 May 1912 at Kurrajong, New South Wales, eldest son of locally born parents Stephen Wilson, labourer, and his wife Ina Selina, née Howard. Wilson’s mother had been a member of a touring children’s light opera company, ‘Pollard’s Lilliputians’, and she and her father Willie, a violinist with the company, surrounded the boy with music and theatre from his infancy. In about 1916 his father moved the family to Turramurra, Sydney, where Wilson attended Warrawee Public School, leaving at fifteen, and abandoning his dream of studying medicine. By 1930 he had changed his family name to Wilson Irving