Ng Wui (3 December 1913 – 1 March 1996), born Ng Yiu-man, was a Hong Kong Cantonese-film director, screenwriter and actor. A native of Xinhui in Guangdong who was born in Guangzhou into a merchant family whose brothers all loved the theatre, he studied drama at the Guangdong Film School and at the drama school attached to the Guangdong Theatre Institute, where his classmates included Lee Sun-fung and Lo Duen, with whom he also formed a theatre troupe. He came to Hong Kong in 1939 and joined the Grandview Film Company as an actor, his first appearance being Poor Souls (1940). In 1941 he turned to directing, his debut being Tonight the Moon Is Full. After Hong Kong fell he fled with his wife and daughter to Guangzhouwan, and later formed a troupe with Cheung Ying, Wong Man-lei, Mui Yee and Lo Duen, moving before Guangzhouwan's fall to Vietnam, Singapore and Malaya, where they earned a living by performing spoken drama. Back in Hong Kong, his first post-war film as director was Tears on the Pillow of Longing (1947). In the early 1950s, alarmed at the declining quality of Cantonese cinema, he and a group of filmmakers launched the 'Cantonese Film Clean-up Movement'. He joined Sun Luen Film Company and wrote and directed its first production, The Prodigal Son (1952), and in 1952 helped found Union Film Enterprise, for whose inaugural production he wrote and directed Family (1953), adapted from Ba Jin's novel and featuring a large cast of Cantonese stars; it became a landmark literary melodrama. He also directed Thunderstorm and The Wilderness from Cao Yu's plays. He formed Hill Union Film with Pak Yin and Cheung Wood-yau to produce Chor Yuen's The Great Devotion (1960), and set up the Tek Ngai and Wing Luen companies. Over a near-forty-year career he made more than two hundred films, a rare output. Turning to television in the 1970s, he worked as planner, director and actor before retiring in the mid-1980s, and in 1994 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild. He died in Zhongshan on 1 March 1996, aged 82.
Ng directed more than two hundred Cantonese films and, through literary adaptations such as Family, raised the ambition of Cantonese melodrama, making him one of the busiest and most influential directors of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong.
Achievements
- 1940 · Made his acting debut in Poor Souls
- 1941 · Directed his first film, Tonight the Moon Is Full
- 1953 · Directed Family, Union Film Enterprise's first production, adapted from Ba Jin's novel