Pam Hardyment writes: Burt Kwouk and I were friends for many years, during which we drank at the Colony Club and Groucho’s. One day I approached him to help my son Ben, who was making his film The Wonderland Experience (2002), in Goa, on a very tight budget. There were no fees, and Burt naturally refused, so I threw a plane ticket on to the carpet in Groucho’s and invited him to take it or leave it. “Is it economy class?” “Yes, Burt.” “And why should I put up with screaming babies and sitting like a sack of potatoes when I am used to travelling first class!” We stared into our drinks silently.
Then he picked up the ticket, smiled, put it in his pocket and walked out. He sat next to his colleague Vernon Dobtcheff on the plane, enjoyed himself, I understand, and played a magnificent Yo-Yo in the film.
Richard Coombs writes: I was the manager of the North Wales Film and Television Trail when Burt Kwouk opened the first in our series of plaques celebrating film locations in the region. I had the honour of meeting him at Bangor station and had an hour’s chat with a film hero while we went to his hotel on the way to Beddgelert, where the plaque is situated (the area had stood in for China in the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, in which Kwouk had one of his first major roles). The Wales Film Commission had managed to find more than 40 members of the Liverpool Chinese community who had appeared in the film as child extras, now in middle age, and they all attended the opening.
Kwouk was delighted and spent a great deal of time chatting with them, having a couple of beers and a few cigarettes. I had a panic trying to find him in the nearby bars, so he could get back to the station in time for his train back home.
