David Kentish (4 September 1923 – 14 April 1963) was a British artist and actor producer.
David Kentish was educated at Bryanston School and trained as an artist under Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, together with Lucian Freud and Bettina Shaw-Lawrence.
David was the younger brother of the operatic tenor John Kentish. Another of his siblings was actress Elizabeth Kentish.
In 1939, Kentish spent the first winter of the 2nd World War in Capel Curig, Wales, with Lucian Freud and the poet Stephen Spender, where they rented lodgings in a retired miner’s cottage. Kentish was recovering from TB, contracted at school, and Spender was in the immediate aftermath of his marriage break-up.
They spent their days painting and the evenings drawing by lamplight, whilst Spender worked on his novel The Backward Son. The winter was hard and there was little to do except work, read, talk and listen to the recordings of Wagner that Kentish had brought. Freud’s portrait of David Kentish, his rugger-playing school friend from Bryanston public school, along with the sketches he made at this time, was exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London in 2003.
Kentish was also an actor, and acting and stage management gradually took over his life. In New York on Broadway, he acted in King Henry IV Part 1 & Part II and Oedipus Rex (1946) and was the production stage manager for Lawrence Olivier on Anthony and Cleopatra (1951) and Venus Observed (1952).
In the late 1950s and early 1960s he worked for Associated-Rediffusion producing documentaries such as Out of Step with Daniel Farson.