Richard Ng Yiu Hon (27 December 1939 – 9 April 2023) came from Huiyang in Guangdong and was a Hong Kong actor and businessman, known as the 'original deadpan comedian'; his son Carl Ng is also an actor. The youngest son of his father's second wife and the eighth of sixteen siblings, he lost his mother at seven. His father Ng Hoi-lam was a co-founder of Kowloon Motor Bus and the Kowloon funeral parlour, and the family lived in its own five-storey house on Shan Lam Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. He boarded at St Stephen's College Preparatory School from the age of seven and later attended St Stephen's College. In 1955, aged fifteen, he went to Eton; he studied dentistry at university for only two years before dropping out to train at a drama school in Hampshire. In 1967 a manager introduced him to the BBC, where he starred in four television comedies, supporting himself by dealing in Chinese antiques, washing dishes and working as a Christmas postman. He returned to Hong Kong in 1970 and ran a hair salon with his wife on Prince Edward Road from 1970 to 1994. Through the actress Elaine Jin he met Selina Chow and joined TVB, writing for the comedy show Enjoy Yourself Tonight before Michael Hui cast him as a uniformed policeman in The Private Eyes. In 1975 he founded Pioneer Film, producing his first self-financed film in 1976, and went on to appear in Money Crazy (1977), Crazy Mad (1979), which he also wrote and directed, and Long Quan Wei (1981). In 1983 he starred in Winners and Sinners, forming the 'Lucky Stars' with Sammo Hung, Stanley Fung and Charlie Chin, and earned his first Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor nomination; he was nominated again in 1989 for Beyond the Sunset. His 1984 police comedy Pom Pom, with John Sham and Deanie Ip, became a genre classic and spawned three sequels by the same team. In 1989 he hosted Hong Kong's first candid-camera prank show for ATV, which grew from thirteen to thirty-nine episodes and was the station's top-rated programme that year. He moved his family to Britain in 1996 and lived largely in retirement, returning to act occasionally. He died of cardiac arrest on 9 April 2023, aged 83.
In the Lucky Stars films he developed a deadpan style of his own, and his pairing with Sammo Hung and others drove the 1980s vogue for Hong Kong action comedy; moving between television and film, his English comic training offered local comedy a different point of reference.
Achievements
- 1967 · Joined the BBC and starred in four television comedies
- 1983 · Starred in Winners and Sinners, earning his first Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor nomination
- 1989 · Earned a second Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor nomination for Beyond the Sunset