'EastEnders' star Sid Owen is the only person in his family who has not been to prison.
Sid Owen is the only person in his family not to have been behind bars
The 51-year-old actor- who has played the ill-fortuned Ricky Butcher in the BBC soap for 35 years - admitted that one of his earliest memories is being escorted off a plane after police arrested his dad for his role in a bank robbery.
He told The Daily Mirror newspaper: "I feel like the odd one out – everyone in my family had done time. Even my mum was a petty thief. I wanted to see what my brothers and Dad had to deal with.
"I was two when they came on the plane and took us off and arrested him for armed robbery. Then I vaguely remember being about four years old, going to visit him in prison.
"After that, all I heard was bad stories of him and he was banged up for a long time. So it was just my choice to cut all that off and do my own thing."
When he was seven, Sid went to live with his aunt after his mother, who had to raise him and his siblings alone, died of cervical cancer when she was 35.
The former 'Strictly Come Dancing' contestant said that had he not started acting classes, he would have fallen into a life of crime and drugs, much like his family.
He explained: "I’m not lying, I would’ve gone down that route, because that’s all I knew. Thank God I took my own little path and I got out of the crime that all my family and friends in the area were doing.
"My brother’s been stabbed, been shot at. When I was younger, I had a life that was like that, but I thought, ‘I cannot do the time’, so I would never be the one to do the crime."
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