Radford was born in Chester, England on 25 June 1897.
In 1926 he married Shirley Deuchars. They had one son.
He was a commissioned officer in the British Army's South Staffordshire Regiment in the First World War, in 1918 transferring into the Royal Air Force, ending the war as a subaltern when he was demobilised in 1920. Radford had a crescentic scar on his right cheek from a wound sustained during his time in the trenches. Depending on the lighting and camera angle it varied from barely perceptible to prominence. ref>Article in 'The Guardian' newspaper 29.12.2007 entitled 'Mustard and Cress by M. Sweet https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/dec/29/film</ref>
Apart from his long-running partnership with Naunton Wayne, Radford made many other memorable film appearances in character roles. His other films included Young and Innocent (also for Hitchcock) (1937), The Way to the Stars (1945), The Captive Heart (1946), The Winslow Boy (1948) and Whisky Galore! (1949).
The two first appeared as their characters Charters and Caldicott in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes. They were popular enough to reprise their roles in Night Train to Munich, which was again scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.
They appeared together in several other 1940s films, including Crook's Tour (1941), Millions Like Us (1943), Dead of Night (1945), Quartet (1948), It's Not Cricket (1949), Stop Press Girl (1949), and Passport to Pimlico (1949).
Radford's health began seriously to fail in the summer of 1951, forcing him to take a long break from acting. He died of a heart attack on 20 October 1952, while rehearsing for a radio show with Naunton Wayne in London.
