Obituaries

Saturday, 4 June 2016

Richard Davalos, actor

Although it is not known whether Morrissey did contact the actor, a photograph of Davalos, taken during the filming of East of Eden, featured on the cover of the Smiths’ final album Strangeways, Here We Come (1987).

Richard Davalos was born on November 5 1930 in the Bronx, New York City, to Finnish and Spanish parents. Having decided to become an actor, he started out in 1953 in early television with a role in the series Goodyear Playhouse, and in 1955 won a role on stage in the one-act Broadway drama A Memory of Two Mondays, by Arthur Miller.

It was presented in tandem with another play by the author, a one-act version of A View from the Bridge, and in 1956 Davalos won the Theatre World Award for his performances in both plays.

Richard Davalos (standing), James Dean and Julie Harris in East of Eden

It was Elia Kazan, who was preparing an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden to star James Dean, who lured him to Hollywood, where he arranged for Davalos and Dean to share an apartment above a pharmacy across the street from the Warner Bros studios. Kazan apparently hoped that Davalos’s presence would help keep Dean out of trouble and dissuade him from indulging in the sort of after-hours antics that had been attracting unfavourable attention in the press.

Davalos had not been the first choice to play Aaron Task. Paul Newman was originally given a screen test with Dean (who had been cast as Cal, Aaron’s ne’er-do-well younger brother), but as the actress Lois Smith (who played Anne in the film) observed, “Dean and Newman together – that would have been too much. How would theatre managers have handled the mobs of screaming, adoring, hormonal girls?”

Davalos was not happy about sharing with Dean, whose slovenly personal habits disgusted him and who, he later suggested, had a crush on him.

Although Dean told the press that he was in love with the actress Pier Angeli, a scene which was later cut from the film, involving a tussle between the two brothers, is said to have been removed because it was too homoerotic.

(l-r) Richard Davalos, James Dean, Julie Harris in East of Eden

It was Dean who grabbed audiences’ attention, though many critics thought that Davalos had the edge as an actor. Dean’s premature death in 1955 elevated the film, and Dean, to cult status, but Davalos was unable to hitch a lift on the dead star’s coat-tails. After East of Eden, Davalos’s film career faltered. His other credits included The Sea Chase (1955), with John Wayne and Lana Turner, the film-noir thriller I Died a Thousand Times (1955), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters, and the Alan Ladd and Sidney Poitier Korean War vehicle All the Young Men (1960).

He gave solid performances as Blind Dick in Cool Hand Luke (1967), and as Rick Bowman, a street punk who winds up in jail after a street car race goes wrong in Pit Stop (1969). In Kelly’s Heroes (1970) he was Private Gutowski.

His television credits included Bonanza; Rawhide; Perry Mason; The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O. He also appeared in some mostly forgettable straight-to-video releases. His final role was as Don Lazzaro in Ninja Cheerleaders (2008).

By his marriage to the dancer Ellen van der Hoeven he had two daughters.

Richard Davalos, born November 5 1930, died March 8 2016

Alan Devereux, actor - the archers

Sid was a teenage former Borstal boy from Birmingham when he arrived in Ambridge on September 30 1963 and he took his place behind the bar of The Bull in 1972 when he and Polly, the first of his three wives, took over the pub. He continued to run it until his character was killed off in 2010.

Sid made the news in 1979 when, in the episode broadcast the day after the general election (but pre-recorded before the poll), he commented on Mrs Thatcher’s victory. William Smethhurst, the former editor of the series, recalled that “In the studio actor Alan Devereux remained at the microphone expectantly, waiting for an alternative script to be given to him. It wasn’t. The national press happily ran the story – Ambridge, the only place in England that knows the result of the general election...”

Undoubtedly the highlight of his time on the show, however, came in 2000 when he and “saucy line dancer” and country singer Jolene Rogers (Buffy Davis) got down to some serious hanky panky in the shower.

Fans knew that Sid, married to his second wife Kathy (Heidi Niklaus), had fallen for the voluptuous Jolene because they had heard the pair kissing and canoodling, with Sid sighing: “Ooh, Jolene, you shouldn’t be doing that. You’ll be the death of me.”

Though the heavily-trailed shower scene was not the first time The Archers plotline had featured sex, previous affairs had been conducted on the quiet. Sid and Jolene were the first to have “explicit” sex in the series.

Listeners were promised the “raunchiest” episode in the soap’s 49-year history. “They’re in the shower all right,” claimed the editor Vanessa Whitburn. “The actors are excellent and it’s a passionate and sensitive story line.” To family campaigners who condemned the scene she was unrepentant. “It is not a cynical exercise to boost ratings,” she declared. “It is a story about life, and we do them all the time.”

As it transpired, however, many listeners found the scene, recorded in the distinctly unsexy environs of the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, a bit of a disappointment. “Instead of the sounds of unbridled passion among the soap suds, listeners were treated to a mundane discussion of water temperature and the relative merits of shower gel versus coal-tar soap,” complained one reviewer.

“The scene was so tame that Sid Perks... was able to utter the line 'I’m putty in your hands’ without it even sounding like a double-entendre.”

Alan Devereux was born in 1941 and educated in Sutton Coldfield. Aged 14 he began attending evening classes in speech and drama and a year later went to Birmingham Theatre School.

After featuring in BBC radio plays and in walk-on parts on television, he made his first professional appearance on stage as the young Coriolanus at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1956. He then spent five years as assistant stage manager at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, and the Grand in Wolverhampton.

As well as his long-running role as Sid Perks, he performed in more than 100 radio plays, supplied voiceovers for audio-visual films and radio commercials and also appeared in many television advertisements.

In 2010 Sid Perks was announced to have mysteriously died off-scene while jogging in New Zealand, prompting speculation that Devereux had fallen out with the producers. It seems, however, that he was not in good health and had wanted to go.

In 1965 he married his wife Christine, who survives him with their son and daughter, the actress Tracy Jane White, who played Sid Perks’s daughter Lucy.

Alan Devereux, born 1941, died May 29 2016

Wednesday, 1 June 2016

Carla Lane, television scriptwriter

Carla Lane, who has died aged 87, created The Liver Birds, Butterflies and Bread, classic television sitcoms that crowned her the most successful woman writer in British television comedy; she was also a prominent, if eccentric, campaigner for animal rights.

No television writer became more accomplished at lightly rueful reflections on the clichés of English middle-class family life, observed The Daily Telegraph, although it was Carla Lane’s excursion into the netherworld of Liverpool scallywags in Bread (1987-91) that marked her out as a true original.

Having flaunted 1960s popular Liverpool culture in The Liver Birds, she became the first woman to mine television comedy from sexual and personal relationships through a galère of expertly-etched contemporary characters, developed against a backdrop of social issues such as divorce, adultery and, in one of her later works, alcoholism.

Sandra (Nerys Hughes) and Beryl (Polly James) in The Liver Birds

Unemployment was the underlying theme to Bread, which excited mixed feelings in Carla Lane’s native city with its stereotypical depictions of a sprawling family of streetwise, dole-fiddling, scrounging Scousers. Never one to rely on straightforward wisecracks, Carla Lane infused her scripts with the humour created by sharply-drawn characters and narratives that were more realistic than the typical bland sitcom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Although not an instant success, within little more than a year, Bread had climbed to the top of the television ratings. Freighted with humorous observation and nifty phrase-making, Carla Lane’s scripts drew and unflinching but affectionate portrait of the Boswells (a smarter and more endearing television clan than the cartoon Simpsons, which they partly resembled), to become, as the Telegraph approvingly noted, “as deeply a part of British TV culture as the denizens of Coronation Street”.

What kept the series on the boil was Carla Lane’s rich infusion of folksy philosophy and the way the family invariably returned (after often extravagantly aberrant detours) to the values of its redoubtable matriarchal heroine, Nellie Boswell (played by Jean Boht). With more than 11 million viewers, Bread was only trumped in the ratings by EastEnders and Neighbours.

Some, however, considered the bittersweet Butterflies (1978-83), with its subversive theme of unfulfilled, adulterous yearnings, to be Carla Lane’s most successful series. She managed to maintain an upbeat mood while exploring overwhelming marital boredom and frustration as her middle-class heroine Ria (Wendy Craig) contemplates an affair. In 1979, when the format was sold to American television, Carla Lane flew to Los Angeles to work on the script but was gravely disappointed with the pilot and a series was never made.

In Solo (1981-82), Felicity Kendal was cast against type after her submissive character in The Good Life to portray a woman seeking a more assertive role as a successful singleton, a quest that Carla Lane handled with a characteristically light touch.

But amid the triumphs, there were duds. No Strings (1974), starring Rita Tushingham and Keith Barron, commissioned as a series on the strength of a promising pilot for Comedy Playhouse, guttered after a mere six episodes. The Mistress (1985), again starring Felicity Kendal in the title role, also disappointed, amounting, in the opinion of The Daily Telegraph’s Richard Last, to “a waste of two outstanding talents”.

In the same year, Carla Lane’s excursion into darker comedy territory, in I Woke Up One Morning (1985), depicted a group of recovering alcoholics drying out in hospital, a scenario beyond the ken of a teetotal writer, and the show was pulled after two short series.

In Screaming (1992), a trio of angst-ridden woman of a certain age determined to do without men, while each remaining secretly in love with the same one. Critics objected to Carla Lane’s overt, old-fashioned feminism, and after a tabloid mauling, she declined to write a second series.

Basically, I’m a loony, but it’s the best way to be with all the horrible things going on in the worldCarla Lane

Since 1965, Carla Lane had been not only a vegetarian but a vociferous campaigner for animal rights. “I can’t understand why people kill and eat animals,” she insisted. In 1990 she formed an animal trust, Animal Line, with her friend Linda McCartney and the Liverpool-born actress Rita Tushingham. “Basically, I’m a loony,” she declared, “but it’s the best way to be with all the horrible things going on in the world.”

Carla Lane protesting against marchers participating in the Countryside Alliance march for Liberty and Livelihood in London in 2002

Carla Lane was born Romana Barrack on August 5 1928, the daughter of DeVinci Barrack, a 19-year-old Italian engineer in the Merchant Navy. She started writing as a child, winning her first award for a school poem published in the Liverpool Echo when she was seven. After an unhappy spell at a Liverpool convent, she left school aged 14 and was working as a nurse when she married three years later. While bringing up her two young sons, she wrote short stories for local newspapers and radio scripts, and joined a writer’s workshop in Liverpool where she met Myra Taylor.

With her new friend, Carla Lane wrote a series of bizarre comic sketches Up, Down, All Around, and sent it to the BBC’s head of comedy, Michael Mills. “Give me something I can understand,” he replied. “Or not totally beyond my imagination.” Mills had discerned a hidden comic talent.

The two Liverpool housewives came up with The Liver Birds, about two single Liverpudlian girls, Beryl and Sandra, sharing a flat. After a pilot was floated in the Comedy Playhouse strand in April 1969, a series of four (in black and white) debuted the following July, a week after the first Moon landing. Reaction was muted. A disappointed Mills declined a second series, and Carla Lane’s agents wrote to say that they did not feel she had any potential as a writer.

Her response was to lock herself in her room and write, unaided and unedited, a single episode of The Liver Birds. In it Beryl (Polly James) wanted to spend the night with a man, and Sandra (Pauline Collins, later to be replaced by Nerys Hughes) was appalled. Carla Lane sent it to Mills, who replied with a handwritten note: “Six more. By yesterday. Love, Michael”

Carla Lane had tapped into the zeitgeist. “This was a breakthrough period for young, single women following centuries of repression,” noted the television writer Mark Lewisohn. “They had independence, both sexual and financial, and the opportunity to live life as they wanted it, and Carla Lane’s scripts reflected this admirably, as well as sketching the uncertainties and philosophies of being single when everyone else seemd to be married.”

Already her ability to conjure “laughs out of pathos” and life’s “little tragedies” as she called them, was becoming apparent. From series three, in 1972, Carla Lane and Myra Taylor wrote unencumbered by script editors, but Myra Taylor left the writing partnership shortly afterwards leaving Carla Lane in sole charge. In all, The Liver Birds ran for 87 episodes, including a revival in 1996.

In 1988, the year in which Bread topped the Christmas television ratings, Carla Lane bought the Grade II Zoffany House on the Thames at Strand-on-the-Green, once occupied by the portraitist John Zoffany, for £675,000.

Carla Lane in the grounds of her home and animal sanctuary in Sussex

In 1991 she bought the tiny inhabited island of St Tudwal’s East, off Abersoch on the north Wales coast, to rescue its starving wildlife, mainly deer, and built a stone circle there to commemorate the animals who had not survived winter food shortages. At around the same time she moved from London to establish a menagerie at a 50-room Elizabethan manor house in Sussex. An unexpected tax demand in 1993 coincided with the launch of Luv, a new sitcom she had written about a wealthy middle-aged Liverpool couple whose marriage has failed, but it was a feeble effort for a writer with such an impressive track record. Nor did Searching, her 1995 series for ITV, succeed in restoring her early reputation.

Latterly she returned to live with her family in Liverpool, wistfully recalling “my rich days” and reflecting on her reversal of fortune. Although she considered a way with words to be her only gift, she was ashamed to admit that she had never read a book from beginning to end.

Appointed OBE in 1989, she returned the insignia in 2002 in protest at the CBE awarded to Brian Cass, head of Huntingdon Life Sciences, which runs laboratories where drugs are tested on animals. She received a handwritten note from the prime minister, Tony Blair, saying she could have it back at any time she cared to ask. She never did.

Obsessively opaque about her real age, she invariably rolled forward her birth date by as much as nine years.

Carla Lane married Eric Hollins, a naval architect, when she was 17. The couple divorced in 1981, and she is survived by two sons of the marriage.

Carla Lane, born August 5 1928, died May 31 2016

Conrad Phillips, actor - (William Tell)

Period tales of derring-do were a staple of the early evening television of the time and when The Adventures of Robin Hood (starring Richard Greene) wound down at the end of the 1950s, Phillips began to perform a similar “swashbuckling” role. As the 14th-century Swiss folk hero (though speaking his lines in crisp English RP), he wielded a crossbow against the occupying forces of Emperor Rudolph of Austria in 39 episodes of the ITC series.

While shooting in Snowdonia, each day’s rushes would be screened at the only cinema nearby, at the village of Llanberis. Phillips did much of his own stunt work in the mountains and suffered several injuries.

The show was sold throughout the world, even, to Phillips’s surprise, behind the Iron Curtain: “I think there was the association with the wartime resistance that still lingered on. It was an easy concept for people to understand: the occupation by Austria in the case of William Tell, and the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazis.”

Conrad Phillips: did much of his own stunt work

He was born Conrad Philip Havord on April 13 1925 in south London. His father, Horace Havord, was a journalist on The Sunday Express who also wrote mystery novels under the nom de plume Conrad Phillips. He later suggested it to his son as a stage name.

Phillips attended St John’s Bowyer School, Clapham, and when war broke out joined the Home Guard. Aged 17, he volunteered for the Royal Navy, with which he served as an able seaman manning a gun on landing craft. Invalided out of the service in 1945, he enrolled at Rada on a ex-serviceman’s grant. “My audition was, to say the least, committed,” he said. “I threw myself around the stage with passion and secured a place as a student for two years.” His fencing lessons at Rada would later come in useful while filming The Adventures of William Tell.

During the 1950s he alternated theatre work with television and film roles, including an appearance alongside Peter Finch in Powell and Pressburger’s The Battle of the River Plate, before winning the part of William Tell.

After the series ended Phillips and Peter Maxwell, one of the programme’s directors, formed Arriba Productions and worked together on the B-movie Impact (1963), about a crime reporter framed for a robbery. Maxwell directed while Phillips starred as the wronged man.

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s he continued to appear on stage, including a run with the ENO at the Coliseum, on the small screen (Fawlty Towers, Heidi, Callan), and in cinema. By the mid-1970s he was balancing an acting career with the management of a hill farm in Scotland.

Phillips in The Adventures of William Tell

During the 1980s Phillips’s credits included The Return of Sherlock Holmes; Emmerdale; Howard’s Way and Hannay. He returned to the story of William Tell for Crossbow (1987-88) in which he played Stefan, the protagonist’s mentor. “Stefan was a much older and grizzled character,” Phillips recalled. “I had far more action in my series but I enjoyed the challenge [of being] an arthritic warrior.”

He retired from acting in the early 1990s and in later life lived in Chippenham, Wiltshire. In 2013 he published his memoirs, Aiming True (2013). “I’ve had quite a bouncy life,” he wrote.

In 1949 Phillips married Jean Moir, who also studied at Rada. The marriage was later dissolved and in 1968 he married, secondly, Jennie Slatter, who survives him with their two daughters. A son from his first marriage predeceased him.

Conrad Phillips, born April 13 1925, died 13 January 13 2016

Alan Young, actor

Alan Young, who has died aged 96, was a British-born actor who became famous as the human sidekick of Mister Ed, the talking horse, in the eponymous 1960s CBS sit-com.

When he was first approached to play the role of Wilbur Post, Mister Ed’s hapless owner, in the early 1950s, Young, an Emmy-winning star of his own comedy revue, replied that he “didn’t want to work with anybody who doesn’t clean up after themselves”.

In the meantime the actor George Burns had financed an unsuccessful Mister Ed pilot with another actor and in 1959 he again approached Young, saying that he looked “like the kind of guy a horse would talk to”.

Seven years later, nobody was knocking on my door and I was willing to talk to anyone, including a horseAlan Young

“Seven years later,” Young recalled, “nobody was knocking on my door and I was willing to talk to anyone, including a horse.”

The star of the show was a palomino gelding called Bamboo Harvester, whose gravelly voice was provided by Allen “Rocky” Lane, a star of 1930s low-budget Westerns. From 1961 to 1965 the mischievous Mister Ed and his less intelligent owner entertained viewers with plot lines that revolved around the horse’s skills as a troublemaker and Wilbur’s efforts to conceal their conversations.

Wilbur, Young recalled, was “naive and bumbling”, while “Ed was a wily one. I think it’s the same chemistry that made Laurel and Hardy and Jackie Gleason and Art Carney: it’s the one guy making a fool of the other guy.”

Each show began with Mister Ed whinnying: “Hello, I’m Mister Ed,” followed by the theme song: “A horse is a horse, of course, of course...” Star guests included, one one occasion, Zsa Zsa Gabor who, Young recalled, tried to drive off with a $10,000 mink coat that she wore for the show. Stopped by security guards as she left the studio, she was unrepentant. “I’m sorry, dahling,” Young recalled her saying, “but most of the studios give me coats like this as gifts.”

The show spawned all sorts of stories about Mister Ed. Claims that he was really a trained zebra, which had been brought in at the last minute as a replacement for a recalcitrant horse to save the show from being cancelled, were denied – as was a story put about by two Ohio fundamentalist preachers that the “Mister Ed” theme song played backwards referred to the devil.

Young once spread a rumour that the film crew used peanut butter to get Mister Ed to 'speak'

Young himself confessed to spreading a rumour that the film crew would spread peanut butter on the horse’s lips to get him to “speak”, though he later claimed that the trick had been to place a piece of soft nylon under his lip which the horse would try to work out: “But I’ll tell you this. After the first year, you couldn’t shut him up, because as soon as I stopped talking, his lips started to move.”

The rumours continued after the show ended, when Young, who owned shares in Mister Ed, made a fortune off the royalties and often attended fan conventions, sometimes accompanied by Connie Hines, his television wife Carol.

There was a continuing mystery over the circumstances of Mister Ed’s death and in 1997, with the 1960s comedy gaining in popularity through reruns, a Californian radio personality launched a contest to determine where the horse was buried.

Three people won after identifying a site in north-eastern Oklahoma, but Young felt obliged to set the matter straight. “I don’t want to prick the people in Oklahoma’s bubble,” he said, but the horse had died on the California ranch owned by his trainer, Lester Hilton.

Alan Young posing with a Mister Ed lookalike in San Francisco in 1997

After the show ended its five-year run in 1965, Mister Ed had lived out his life on the ranch, where Young would ride him every day. In about 1973, however, he “went over to Lester’s little spread, and Lester was sitting very quietly. He said, 'We lost Ed.’ He said he had a horsesitter and the horsesitter thought Ed was having a fit, and he gave him a tranquilliser and Ed just didn’t wake up.” The horse was subsequently cremated.

He was born Angus Young to Scottish parents at Tynemouth, Northumberland, on November 19 1919 and moved with his family to British Columbia, Canada, when he was young: “My dad’s specialty was losing money, so after he lost it in a mining venture in northern British Columbia, he wound up as a shipyard worker in West Vancouver, where I finished high school. I was acting in radio plays at 13 and had my own [radio show] at the age of 16.” He performed as a mimic, specialising in Gracie Fields impressions until his voice broke.

After working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War, Young moved to New York as a summer replacement for Eddie Cantor on his radio comedy show. He decided to stay on, with a tour as Liberace’s opening act, and in 1946 Darryl F Zanuck brought him to Hollywood to co-star with Jeanne Crain in Margie. He appeared with a young Natalie Wood in Chicken Every Sunday, and with Shirley Temple in Mr Belvedere Goes to College (both 1949) before landing his own television comedy variety show, The Alan Young Show, which ran from 1950 to 1953 on NBC Radio and won two Emmys.

In the mid-1950s, with invitations drying up, he returned to Britain, where he appeared on radio and made two low-budget films. In 1960, however, he moved back to America to work with George Pal on The Time Machine, an adaptation of HG Wells’s novel.

After Mister Ed was put out to grass, and an unsuccessful stint on Broadway, Young dropped out of acting for nearly a decade to set up broadcasting facilities for the Christian Science Church, which he had joined as a child.

Returning to acting, he appeared in television series and developed a new career as a voice-over actor on film and television. He voiced the Disney animated character Scrooge McDuck in the television cartoon series Duck Tales, and several characters in the Belgian comic franchise The Smurfs.

Young’s first marriage was dissolved and in 1948 he married Virginia McCurdy, a singer who died in 2011. He is survived by four children.

Alan Young, born November 19 1919, died May 19 2016

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

Burt Kwouk

Burt Kwouk, who has died aged 85, was best known for his role as Cato Fong, the long-suffering manservant of Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) in the Pink Panther films.

As well as answering the telephone and dealing with the inspector’s daily needs, Cato’s chief role was to keep Clouseau vigilant by attacking him whenever he least expected it. Their encounters became a running joke throughout the Pink Panther series and the scenes involving their preposterous karate-style sparring – interspersed with loud screams – generally resulted in the destruction of Clouseau’s flat and Cato himself being knocked out, usually because of one of Clouseau’s underhand tricks.

Burt Kwouk and Peter Sellers in A Shot in the Dark (1964)

“But Cato,” the inspector tells him before kicking him in the face in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), “your fly is undone… and so, my friend, are you.”

Pink Panther fans (including the Prince of Wales and Elvis Presley, who could quote chunks of dialogue verbatim) loved the gag – particularly the slow-motion martial arts yowls and Cato’s ingenious hiding places, such as the canopy of a four-poster bed and a freezer. (“You know, Cato, your freezer ambush ploy. I really congratulate you.”)

It was mayhem, half the time I was petrified I was actually going to get hurt by one of Peter’s wild lungesBurt Kwouk

Although Kwouk appeared in three James Bond films (including the spoof Casino Royale in 1967) and had a successful subsequent career on British television, his fondest professional memories were of his time in the Pink Panther films, and his friendship with Sellers endured until the actor’s death in 1980. “I learnt a lot from Peter,” he later recalled. “Particularly how to be 'second banana’ – by which I mean like a straight man to him.”

He was sanguine about Clouseau’s affectionate references to Cato as his “little yellow friend”. “They can call me anything they like,” he once said, “as long as I get paid and my name is spelt correctly.”

Burt Kwouk in an episode of The Saint (1967)

Herbert Tsangtse Kwouk was born on July 18 1930 at Warrington while his parents were touring Europe. His father, a textile tycoon, was a descendant of a Tang dynasty general and Kwouk was brought up in the wealthy, mannered world of pre-war Shanghai. Between the ages of 12 and 16 he attended the Jesuit Mission School in the city, which he described as “the Far East equivalent of Eton”. He was then sent to the US to complete his education. He left China in 1947.

In 1949 Kwouk’s parents and sister were caught up in the Chinese revolution. Kwouk’s British passport enabled his mother and sister to leave for Hong Kong, but his father stayed in China. “I think my father supported the revolution,” Kwouk recalled, “because, morally, a person could not fail to support it: the mass of Chinese people were starving on the streets.”

He remained in America and continued his education until 1954 when he decided to tour Europe. Arriving in Britain he found a room in Ladbroke Grove and began looking for work. “I had no idea what I wanted to do,” he said, “but I went into catering because at least there you get to eat.” He worked as a dish-washer for Joe Lyons before moving on to a variety of jobs including mortuary attendant and later “butter-wrapper” at a factory in Clapham.

He spent his free time “hanging around the cheap end of Chelsea” with a group of friends. “We were the gestation period for the Swinging Sixties,” Kwouk explained. “We used to drink wine and talk about what we were going to do with our lives.”

After his girlfriend persuaded him that acting would make a suitable career and arranged for Kwouk to have some publicity photographs, he auditioned and got the part of a Malayan in Windom’s Way (1957), having persuaded the casting director that he spoke fluent Malay (he did not).

Burt Kwouk as the Camp Commandant In the BBC series TenkoCREDIT:

Kwouk was spotted by a talent scout who offered him a role in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958). He then spent the next four years working consistently in a variety of film and television roles. “It made me very unpopular with a lot of the Oriental/American actors,” he said. “They had all been in the business for years and I just arrived from England and walked straight into non-stop work.”

After a part in the 1962 film 55 Days at Peking, Kwouk returned to Britain to appear in various television comedy shows, resisting advice from agents who suggested he change his name to Charlie Chan or Mr Woo. Through the early 1960s he was cast as a villain in series such as Danger Man, The Saint and The Avengers.

In 1964, having appeared as a baddie in Goldfinger, Kwouk was offered the part of Kato (later changed to Cato) in A Shot in the Dark. After reading the script Kwouk turned the part down. “I couldn’t see the point,” he recalled, “the character didn’t have a lot of screen time, didn’t say very much, and kept getting knocked down.” His agent eventually persuaded him that he needed the money and Kwouk accepted the role.

“Peter Sellers made me,” he said later, “there’s no doubt about it. He raised me to higher level and was a very generous actor, he kept finding ways for Cato get a bigger laugh.” Despite Sellers’s eccentricities Kwouk maintained that they had a good working relationship. “Peter was odd,” he admitted, “but few geniuses are not odd. I learned a lot about comedy acting just by watching his eyes before a take.” Cato proved so popular that he was written into all but one of the subsequent films. “1 loved playing the part,” Kwouk recalled, “but it was mayhem, half the time I was petrified I was actually going to get hurt by one of Peter’s wild lunges.”

Kwouk then alternated between playing villains in films such as The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) and You Only Live Twice (1967) and playing Cato, which he did through the 1970s in The Return of the Pink Panther (1974), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and The Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). After Sellers’s death Kwouk wanted to give up the part and possibly against his better judgment he accepted roles in both The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983). Both films were made after Seller’s death and both flopped. He made a small appearance in the Meryl Streep vehicle Plenty (1985) before concentrating on his television career.

He took roles in television drama series such as Tenko (1981-83), in which he played a chilling, sadistic Japanese commandant. While admitting that many of the parts he played were seen by the Chinese community as “derogatory to their race” Kwouk rarely refused a role. “If I don’t do it someone else will,” he reflected.

Kwouk returned to filmmaking with appearances in Air America, opposite Mel Gibson, in 1990, and in Leon the Pig Farmer, a low-budget British production, in 1993. That year he revisited the role of Cato one final time in The Son of the Pink Panther. He became familiar to a new generation on television, with a recurring role as Entwistle in Last of the Summer Wine, and in The Harry Hill Show (as himself).

He was appointed OBE in 2011.

Burt Kwouk was an affable man who liked a glass and a smoke. He is survived by his wife Caroline, whom he married in 1961, and a son.

Burt Kwouk, born July 18 1930, died May 24 2016