Ken Campbell was born on 10 December 1941 in Ilford, and his education took him first to Chigwell School and then to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained as a performer. That formal grounding in dramatic craft would prove to be the starting point for a career that expanded well beyond conventional boundaries.

Campbell worked across an unusually broad range of disciplines — actor, director, playwright, comedian, and ventriloquist. His stage work encompassed both performance and direction, and he also appeared as an actor on television. As a playwright and writer working in the English language, he contributed to the British theatrical culture of which he was a citizen throughout his life. The combination of theatrical writing, direction, live comedy, and ventriloquism gave his output a character that was difficult to place in any single tradition, moving as it did between the literary and the performatively strange without apparent tension. He was a stage actor, a television actor, a theatre director, and a writer, and each of those roles seems to have informed the others in ways that made his career distinctly his own.

Campbell died on 31 August 2008 in Loughton. He was sixty-six years old. From his training at one of Britain's most established drama schools through decades of work spanning the stage, the page, and the television screen, his life in the theatre was marked above all by its refusal to settle into a single form — a quality that his work as a ventriloquist, perhaps more than anything else, neatly embodies.