The affable actor made famous by the Pink Panther films
Though he appeared in numerous Burt Kwouk films and TV shows, who has died aged 85, was best known for his role as Cato Fong in the Pink Panther films. Inspector Clouseau’s manservant, Cato was tasked with keeping the idiotic detective (Peter Sellers) alert by launching surprise attacks against him: thus Kwouk would leap from the canopy of Clouseau’s four-poster bed, or emerge screaming from his freezer, before taking him on in spoof martial arts combat. As an actor, Kwouk was often paid to act out racist stereotypes. He played countless either dastardly or comedy “orientals”; and in war films, was often cast as Japanese and even Korean soldiers, said Harry Hill in The Guardian. “Even in the early 2000s, when I asked him about a new film he was in, he told me: ‘Oh, it’s just the usual. I’m an old Chinese guy who runs a laundry and gets machine-gunned in the first ten minutes.’” Yet he took it in good heart, saying he was glad of the work, and that he did what he could to “elevate” the roles he got.
The son of a prosperous textile manufacturer, Kwouk was born in Warrington (his parents were visiting the UK at the time), but aged ten months, returned to Shanghai, where he was educated at what he described as the “Far East equivalent of Eton”. His father, he said, “supported the [1949] revolution, because, morally, a person could not fail to support it: the mass of Chinese people were starving on the streets”. However, the family lost all of their money, and the young Kwouk used his British passport to get his mother and sister to Hong Kong; he then completed his education in the US, before moving to London in the early 1950s. Settling in Ladbroke Grove, he took a job as a dishwasher, because he knew that in a kitchen, he’d get fed. A girlfriend persuaded him to try his hand at acting, said The Daily Telegraph, and in 1957, he got his first role, in a film called Windom’s Way, by telling a casting director he could speak fluent Malay (he couldn’t). That led to a better part in the 1958 box-office hit The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman – and after that, the work was almost constant: he was cast as baddies in TV shows including The Avengers, in Hammer horror films, and in three Bond movies. It was his role in Goldfinger (1964) that won him the part of Cato in the second Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark, in the same year. An affable man, Kwouk sometimes hinted at a certain ambivalence in his feelings towards Sellers, but insisted that they’d had a good working relationship – and refused to say anything against the notoriously volatile star. “Peter Sellers made me,” he explained. “He raised me to a higher level and was a very generous actor; he kept finding ways for Cato to get a bigger laugh.”
Subsequently, Kwouk showed his dramatic skills as the camp commandant in the BBC series Tenko (1981-84). In 2002, he joined the cast of Last of the Summer Wine, playing a philosophical electrician. Appointed OBE in 2011, he is survived by his wife of 55 years, Caroline, and a son, Christopher.