I’m hoovering up a plate of wild Irish oysters in English’s seafood restaurant, one of the oldest of its kind in Brighton. Swaths of celebs have dined here, though right now it’s the photographs of stars such as Larry Olivier and Omar Sharif who are providing the eye-candy. English’s, thinks its manager, Jonathan Spears, is “so old-fashioned and retro, that oddly we’ve become hip”.

The restaurant is bordello-styled and slightly frayed, but the fish is cooked to a T. So, too, thought Jeanne Moreau. The French star scribbled across her off-kilter beautiful features “a lovely plaice” in approval of the surroundings.

You can never quite quash Brighton’s luvvie ancestry. Indeed, no town of similar size has such a rich concentration of theatrical memory-jogs. And theatricality still pervades, still underpins, this resort, despite its burgeoning boutique hotels and hip clubs.

It’s there in the “anything goes” life-drama of its population. You can smell it in the remix music hall performances at the Komedia, or in Kemp Town, where outrageous burlesque nights feature at the Candy Bar. There are even plans to decobweb the old Hippodrome, shrine of “cheeky chappie” Max Miller, and revive it as a theatrical venue.

This year marks the bicentenary of the Theatre Royal — the magnet that drew so many of these big names to the resort, and seduced a number of them to take up residence.

Julien Boast, the Theatre Royal’s CEO, thinks it’s very much a “kick your shoes off” home-from-home for actors. And the theatre is certainly that. An intimate space, barely changed in 200 years.

New backstage tours illustrate this, from the narrow stage door — the oldest in Britain — set below a labyrinth of tiny cubbyholes, where fishermen once mended nets in between shifting scenery, to the dressing rooms, fashioned from higgledy-piggledy Victorian cottages. Dressing Room 1, sparse and drear as a Fifties’ seaside boarding-house, is where John Gielgud, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier and Bette Davies mugged up on their lines, and Marlene Dietrich acted out her own eccentric drama. Boast says the throaty-voiced star demanded a scrubbing brush and rubber gloves. “Apparently she had an obsessive-compulsive disorder and needed to scour the place from top to bottom.”

She also became obsessed with English’s — daily ordering a silver tray to be sent over with lobster, champagne and a packet of Rothmans.

Drinking dens represented anonymity and indeed democracy in Brighton’s postwar theatrical heyday, and few of these haunts have changed. Pop into the Queensbury Arms in Queensbury Mews and the landlord tells how Olivier would wear old carpet slippers and a mackintosh, and drink champagne next to a lorry driver. Burton and Taylor liked The Volunteer, now the Mash Tun, which still attracts actors. For Graham Greene, the plush-velvet Cricketers in Black Lion Street provided inspiration for a scene in Brighton Rock, and the spot-the-stars photographs of the Theatre Royal’s Colonnade bar show how convenience wins when it comes to a swift half between performances.

Kemp Town and Hove, however, provided that essential element of domestic distance. On a salt-stinging brisk afternoon, the wind whipping the waves into cappuccino foam, I battled past the pier towards Flora Robson’s first Brighton home; not as smart as Terence Rattigan’s, but certainly within sugar-borrowing distance.

Like links in a celebrity chain, Rattigan’s Regency pad gives way to the dolls’ house charm of Royal Crescent, where Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright knocked together numbers 4 and 5, and their neighbour Max Miller lived in comparative modesty down Burlington Street.

There’s Dora Bryan’s present sea-facing flat in the former Clarges Hotel, which she used to own and where she billeted her Carry On co-stars. While eastwards it’s swanky grandeur — from the enormous Regency family home where Cate Blanchett lived until recently to the Lewes Crescent wedding-cake confection of Anna Neagle’s former residence.

My final visit is to Hove’s Embassy Court, an Art Deco gem, whose penthouse apartments attracted celebrities from Rex Harrison to Diana Dors.

The city is a great leveller. The playwright Keith Water-house described Brighton as “looking like a town helping the police with their inquiries”. My own square, now considered des-res, was once the favoured red-light district for luvvies. The ladies have gone now, but the perfume remains.

Need to know Theatrical Brighton walking tours are run by a local historian, Geoff Mead. Details: 01273 501590.

Stay: The Town House (01273 607456, www.thetownhousebrighton.com) has eight rooms in the style of flamboyant stage sets by the former BBC director and owner Maarten Hoffmann. B&B doubles from £85.

For details of Theatre Royal Brighton’s bicentenary productions, including a street birthday party on June 27, see www.theambassadors.com/ theatreroyal.

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