The actor, who was awarded an OBE, was famed for playing Inspector Clouseau’s manservant Cato Fong.
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He also starred in numerous films, among them three James Bond movies including Goldfinger.
Born in the United Kingdom but raised in Shanghai, Kwouk rose to fame in 1964 with the release of the Peter Sellers movie A Shot in the Dark, starring Sellers as Inspector Jacques Clouseau. More recently, he joined Harry Hill’s eponymous TV show and become the face of Channel 4’s interactive gambling show Banzai!
Although Kwouk had a string of film and TV credits to his name, it was his role in seven Pink Panther films opposite Peter Sellers and his successors that brought him worldwide fame.
Remembering the friendship between Mr Kwouk and his father, he said: “Burt was an actor who played many roles in his life and like my father very much enjoyed the comedy stretch in their careers”.
Film director Duncan Jones tweeted: “Just heard the wonderful Burt Kwouk has passed away”.
She added: “Fab actor, lovely fun and gentle man”.
But he memorably returned to the small screen in BBC’s Last Of The Summer Wine as Chinese electrician Entwistle, from 2003 until its end in 2010.
But it is as the servant who forever attacked Peter Sellers’s hapless detective, allegedly to keep him alert, for which he will be best known.
He joked in 2011 of the character: “After a while I got to know Cato quite well, and I liked Cato because he never argued with me and he never borrowed money from me”.
“You always remember your first of anything – your first house, your first auto, your first child, your first woman – you always remember those things and this was a picture made in 1958”. He caught the acting bug in the 1950s and appeared in 1958’s The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, alongside the legendary Ingrid Bergman.
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He was married to Caroline Tebbs with whom he has son Christopher.
