WE have a long and proud list of famous actors who are from Warrington.

Crowning it is Pete Postlethwaite, who I paid tribute to last week.

This week I’m going to throw the spotlight on other performers who hail from our town, even though two of them still seem so unlikely to me.

I’m not a fan of the expression ‘national treasure’ as it is overused. But when you look at some of the people it’s attached to, then I have no hesitation in applying it to Sue Johnston.

She of course made her name as Sheila Grant in Brookside in the 1980s, playing the wife of Ricky Tomlinson’s Bobby Grant.

Sue and Ricky found even greater fame and success in The Royle Family, performing Caroline Aherne’s pitch-perfect scripts as Jim and Barbara Royle.

Sue was born Susan Wright in Warrington in 1943, and grew up in Prescot. In the 1960s she dated a member of the Swinging Blue Jeans, worked for Beatles manager Brian Epstein and was friends with the Fab Four.

Proud northerner Sue has remained loyal to Warrington and to the best of my knowledge still has a home here. Send me your best Sue Johnston stories and memories if you will, please.

Tim Curry is famous for playing Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pennywise the clown in the original version of Stephen King’s It.

He was born in Grappenhall in 1946 but spent most of his childhood in Plymouth. Information about Curry’s life and connections with Grappenhall is scant. There’s a suggestion on the internet that he attended Lymm High School.

Does anyone have any details that can flesh this out? Do you remember Tim? Did you go to school with him?

And finally, Burt Kwouk.

Growing up in the 1970s, I loved the Pink Panther films when they were shown on TV. I always loved Peter Sellers as bumbling Inspector Clouseau. Particularly funny were the scenes where his man servant Cato jumped out of wardrobes and try to garrotte him, all in a bid to improve Clouseau’s reflexes and self-defence.

Cato was played by the inestimable Burt Kwouk, who later in life also appeared in shows like Last of the Summer Wine, Tenko and various Harry Hill programmes.

Sadly, Kwouk died last year aged 85. He was born in Warrington in 1930 because, as he once explained, ‘my mother happened to be there at the time’. Cryptic.

Shortly after he moved to Shanghai and stayed there until he was 17, when he moved to the US and then back to Britain.

Can anyone shed light on where exactly Burt Kwouk was born in Warrington and what the circumstances were?