Tony Leung wife – Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a Hong Kong actor and singer. He is one of Asia’s most successful and internationally recognized actors, and was named as “Small Tiger” among the Five Tiger Generals of TVB
Tony Leung Biography
Tony Leung was born in Hong Kong in June 1962. He is the son of a family of Taishan, Guangdong ancestry. Leung’s early childhood was punctuated with parents’ quarrels and arguments about money.
A mischievous boy in his early years, Leung’s personality changed when his father, a chronic gambler, left the family when he was eight; he and his younger sister were brought up by their mother.
Tony Leung was a slightly reticent, quiet child. He has said that his childhood experiences paved the way for his acting career, which allows him to openly express his feelings: You don’t know what happened, just one day your pop disappears. And from that day on I try not to communicate with anyone.
I’m so afraid to talk to my classmates, afraid that if someone says something about family I won’t know what to do. So I became very isolated. So that’s why I love acting, because I can express all my feelings the way I couldn’t for so long. I’m a quiet person. And then when I went to TV it all came out; I cried and I wasn’t ashamed. The audience thinks it’s the character’s feelings, but really it’s my feelings, all coming out in a rush.
Tony Leung went to private school, but he quit at the age of 15 due to financial difficulties. He was a well-behaved teenager who was very close to his mother. During an interview on the making of Hero, he says that he sees his mother as his definition of a hero for having brought up two children alone.
Tony met actor and comedian Stephen Chow who influenced him to become an actor. Leung studied at the TVB training courses and became host of the children’s program 430 Space Shuttle.
He made his acting debuts in 1982 in the film Forced Vengeance and the TV series Wut lik sap jat and Heung sing long ji.
Leung also starred in the films Mad, Mad 83, Young Cops, Fascinating Affairs, The Lunatics, Love Unto Waste, You Will I Will, People’s Hero, Happy Go Lucky, My Heart is that Eternal Rose, A City of Sadness, Seven Warriors, Bullet in the Heat, The Banquet, Days of Being Wild, Don’t Fool Me, The Tigers, Come Fly the Dragon, The Days of Being Dumb, Hard Boiled, Butterfly and Sword,
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, End of the Road, Hero – Beyond the Boundary of Time, The Magic Crane, Tom, Dick, and Hairy, Always Be the Winners, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, The Returning, Cyclo, Happy Together, The Longest Nite, In the Mood for Love, Infernal Affairs, 2046, Confession of Pain, Lust, Caution, Red Cliff: Part 1, The Silent War, and the Grandmaster.
Leung has won over 20 awards including three Golden Bauhinia Awards, three Golden Horse Awards, and seven Hong Kong Film Awards. He has also released 12 albums from 1986 to 2006. Leung is known as Little Tony to avoid confusion with the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Ka-fai.
Tony Leung Career
After quitting his studies, Tony Leung Chiu-wai worked in a variety of jobs, first as a grocer’s runner at his uncle’s shop, then a home appliance salesman in a Hong Kong shopping center. Around the age of 16, he met future actor and comedian Stephen Chow who influenced his decision to become an actor and remains a good friend.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai graduated from television channel TVB’s acting class in 1982. Due to his boyish looks, TVB initially cast him as the host of a children’s program 430 Space Shuttle, but soon moved him to drama roles beginning with Soldier of Fortune (1982).
He was quickly promoted to leading man status in highly successful primetime series including The Duke of Mount Deer (1984) and New Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre (1986). Leung mostly enjoyed comedies during his television years; it was for these he became well known. In the 1980s, he was named as one of “TVB’s Five Tigers” (their five up-and-coming male TV stars) along with Andy Lau, Felix Wong, Michael Miu, and Kent Tong.
Leung starred in the extremely popular Police Cadet TV serial in 1984 (later named Police Cadet 84 to distinguish it from its two subsequent sequels). The series had an average viewership rating of 50% per episode during its original run.
Leung played an outgoing young man who decides to become a police officer; Maggie Cheung, who also started her career at the same time, played Leung’s upstairs neighbor and love interest. Since then they have worked together on The Yang’s Saga (1985), Days of Being Wild (1991), The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993), Ashes of Time (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000), Hero (2002), and 2046 (2005).
Interviewed by Wong Kar Wai, Leung said that he considered Cheung to be his alter ego. “Maggie is a truly formidable partner – one to waltz with. We do not spend a lot of time with each other, as we like to keep some mystery between us. Whenever I see her, I discover something new about her”. After 8 years with TVB, he left the network to focus on his film career with his final television drama being Ode to Gallantry in 1989.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai is considered by many to be the most acclaimed contemporary actor in greater China. He first garnered international attention in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1989 film A City of Sadness, which won the Venice Golden Lion. Before that, he was already locally known for his TV shows and films in the mid-1980s in Hong Kong.
Leung’s initial transition from television to film in the late 80s and early 90s is considered a low period in his career. He had won two HKFA Best Supporting Actor awards in quick succession but was struggling to establish himself as a leading man on the big screen. In 1992, when he was nominated for a third time in the Supporting Actor category for Hard Boiled, Leung refused the nomination on the grounds that he had a leading role in the film.
His protest was supported by director John Woo and co-star Chow Yun-fat. This later led the Hong Kong Film Awards to change its nomination rules to allow for multiple leading roles from the same film. Leung has also stated that prior to Days of Being Wild (1990), he had lost interest in acting and even considered quitting, but working with Wong Kar-wai and seeing his scene in the final film changed his mind.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s career entered a new chapter when he won dual Best Actor awards at the Golden Horse Awards and Hong Kong Film Awards for Chungking Express (1994), becoming only the second actor to do so after Danny Lee in 1984.
He later repeated the feat with Infernal Affairs in 2003. Beginning with Chungking Express and over the next thirteen years, Leung picked up a record of eight Best Actor wins at the two most prestigious Chinese language film awards, plus a Best Actor prize at Cannes.
Leung often collaborates with director Wong Kar-wai and has appeared in many of his films. His roles include the lonely policeman in Chungking Express (1994), a gay Chinese expatriate living in Argentina in Happy Together (1997), and a self-controlled victim of adultery in In the Mood for Love (2000) for which he won the Best Actor award at Cannes.
He reprised his role from In the Mood for Love as a new Chow Mo-wan in 2046 (2004) and trained in Wing Chun for five years to prepare for his role as Ip Man in Wong’s The Grandmaster. Wong’s Jet Tone Film Production was also Leung’s management agency for many years until 2018.
In addition to his works with Wong, Tony Leung has also starred in three Venice Golden Lion-winning films: A City of Sadness (1989), Cyclo (1995), and Lust, Caution (2007), cementing his reputation internationally in the arthouse cinema world. In 2014, he was a member of the jury of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.
Robert De Niro and Brad Pitt are admirers of his work, and Leung has been labeled by The Times as Asia’s answer to Clark Gable due to their romantic leading roles. His place in Asian cinema has also been compared to Cary Grant or a combination of several A-list Hollywood stars.
Tony Leung is widely believed to be a method actor. He has stated in interviews that he often has trouble separating the characters from himself, beginning with his early TV roles. He usually takes long breaks after filming to recover from a psychologically taxing role, and remnants of the characters still remain within him years later. He has said that the voice of his wife Carina Lau can bring him back to reality.
Tony Leung admits that he has a tendency to stay in his comfort zone and work with familiar teams and filmmakers. Over the course of his career, he has worked with Wong Kar-wai eight times (including See You Tomorrow (2016) which Wong wrote), three times with John Woo, three times with Derek Yee, and twice with Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
He has also worked with the creators of Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau, Alan Mak, Felix Chong) on three other films: Confession of Pain (2006), The Silent War (2012), and the upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong. In recent years, Leung has become more adventurous and more willing to try new things; this includes collaborating with new directors and taking on his first Hollywood role.
In an interview with Senses of Cinema in 2001, Leung said that he had no plans to make a Hollywood debut but would consider it for the right project. He said, “I have many more choices on the character I can play (in Hong Kong). The role for Asian actors and actresses is very restrictive in Hollywood movies.” Actors such as Chow Yun-fat and Jet Li had then made their own debuts in the 1990s. In 2005, he signed with an American agent with the intention to appear in a Hollywood film.
In 2017, Tony Leung was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Producer Kevin Feige announced at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con that Tony Leung will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the villain in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, marking his Hollywood debut. Leung’s character Wenwu is a composite character of Fu Manchu and the Mandarin. The movie premiered on September 3, 2021, and his performance was universally praised.
Tony Leung also had a successful Cantopop and Mandarin pop singing career in the 1990s, which he abandoned focusing on acting. He still occasionally sings for his films; the theme song of Infernal Affairs which he performed with Andy Lau is one of the Top 10 Song of 2003 and won the 22nd Hong Kong Film Awards’ Best Original Film Song.
During the promotion of the film Hero, some commentators in Hong Kong alleged that Leung expressed the view that the Tiananmen Square demonstration crackdown was necessary to maintain stability. Leung made a single comment in response that he may have been misquoted and his statement taken out of context.
Tony Leung speaks Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. Lust, Caution (2007) is the first film where he used his own voice in a Mandarin-speaking role (his dialogue in Hero is dubbed) and Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) is his first English-speaking role, despite always being fluent in the language.
Albert Yeung of Emperor Motion Pictures announced on February 20, 2021, that Leung and Andy Lau will star in the crime drama film Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong, inspired by the downfall of the Carrian Group in the 1980s, in a co-production with mainland Chinese partners.
This would be the duo’s first collaboration since Infernal Affairs III in 2003. Felix Chong, who had previously co-written the Infernal Affairs trilogy, is set to write and direct. In December 2021, Leung completed filming of the World War II spy thriller Anonymous, directed by Cheng Er and produced by Bona Film Group.
Tony Leung Wife
Tony Leung Chiu-wai is married to actress Carina Lau, they had their wedding in 2008.
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