He has a fortune estimated at £1.28bn.

But West End theatre producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh has revealed that it all began from watching a Gaelic show as a boy in the West Highland village of Mallaig.

Sir Cameron - the first Briton from the world of show business to become a billionaire - experienced some of his earliest performances in the fishing port, he has grown to call home.

However the 73-year-old theatre impresario has now also admitted that he also nearly went bust - and it was only the musical Cats that saved him.

In 1981, he produced Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, then considered an unlikely subject for a musical. It became the hit of the season, and went on to become one of the longest running musicals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Sir Cameron was interviewed by three pupils from Mallaig High School - Finn Jobson, Kate Biddulph and Ellie MacPherson - to mark the 25th anniversary of local community newspaper West Word.

He said he was just six when he first set foot in Mallaig on a family holiday and “fell in love with the area”, but had to be taken out of a performance at the old village hall because he could not stop laughing at traditional unaccompanied singing, known as Mouth Music, which is often performed in Gaelic.

Sir Cameron owes his vast fortune to the spectacular success of musicals such as Les Misérables, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon.

But he said that among the earliest shows he was taken to were in Mallaig - where he has owned an estate for 25 years.

He said that his aunt and grandmother first brought him to the area in 1953 and in the evening he would often be taken by the family to concerts at the Old Village Hall.

“They often featured traditional unaccompanied Mouth Music, the sound of which I’m ashamed to admit, used to send me off into fits of giggles which caused my aunt’s hand to to firmly clamp over my mouth to stifle noise and embarrassment,” said Sir Cameron, who grew up in Enfield, London.

But he wanted to be a producer ever since his Aunt Jean took him to see Salad Days when he was eight.

When he left school he became a stage hand and a cleaner at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and worked his way up.

“I then plunged into my career, putting on numerous productions, during the 1970s, often getting into considerable debt when shows didn’t work, until Andrew Lloyd Webber and I met up in 1980 and created a musical everyone else had turned down based on TS Eliot’s poets, Practical Cats,” he revealed.

“Cats was to change the life of everyone who worked on it, and for me paid off my considerable debts and allowed me for the rest of my life, to produce the shows I really wanted to do.

"Luckily for me the public have continued to mostly like the same shows I do.”
Sir Cameron said Mallaig however has changed hugely and mostly for the better.

“Mallaig may have lost most of its great fishing fleet, but it now boasts many other attractions and amenities the village could only have dreamt of years ago,” he said.

Referring to how the ‘Hogwart’s Express’ and Harry Potter have boosted the area, Sir Cameron added: "It is ironic that one of the oldest forms of transport, mostly obsolete around the world, the steam train, would actually both forge and safeguard Mallaig’s destiny.

“I feel most at home in the country, which is why I love the Mallaig area.

"I’ve never been one for the glamorous life, though I do throw a good first night party.

“Being surrounded by nature is one of the most relaxing things for me to do as it is the perfect antidote to the metropolitan way of life which doesn’t really understand that outside the cities, people in the country often think differently and hold different values.”

Sir Cameron said he was optimistic over Mallaig’s future and “for all its remoteness, is a very special place and there is no place like it.”

According to the Sunday Times Rich List this year, Sir Cameron’s personal wealth increased to £1.28bn.

Through his company, Sir Cameron owns eight London theatres - the Prince of Wales, Gielgud, Queen’s, Wyndham’s, Noël Coward, Victoria Palace, Novello and Prince Edward.

It was in November 2000 that his then holiday house on the shore of Loch Nevis was reduced to ashes in a mystery fire.

He has since built a £1.4million replacement mansion.

Sir Cameron’s foundation has in the past donated to the local community - £170,000 to the local area elderly care home - the Mackintosh Centre - £100,000 to build Mallaig Swimming Pool, £100,000 for the local surgery and £50,000 for Mallaig Lifeboat.