Ku Wen-chung (8 February 1909 – 15 June 1981), whose original name was Gu Jingyan and who was a native of Wuxi, Jiangsu, was a Hong Kong director, actor and acting instructor. After graduating from Yuying Middle School in Beijing he studied at the Bayi drama school, then went to Shanghai, where he proofread national phonetic alphabets in textbooks at the Commercial Press before joining Tianyi (Unique) Film Company as a Mandarin supervisor; there he also worked as a continuity clerk, screenwriter, assistant director and editor, and acted in films including Pleasures of the Dance Hall (1931), directing On to Shanghai in 1933. During the War of Resistance he came to Hong Kong and joined the Nanyang Studio run by Runde Shaw. Between 1949 and 1957 he directed many Cantonese films, among them the Seven Swords and Thirteen Knights series, a run of Fang Shiyu pictures such as Fang Shiyu and Hu Huigan (1955), and titles including Black Peony the Heroine and Playboy Emperor. He also directed Mandarin and Amoy-dialect films such as The Story of Qin Liangyu (1953) and The Blood of Patriotic Souls (1957). A character actor as well, he appeared in Yang Kwei-fei (1962), The Twelve Gold Medallions (1970) and The Warlord (1972). From 1961 he headed Shaw Brothers' Southern Drama Group, running its acting classes; over seven intakes enrolment grew from a handful to more than a hundred, and its graduates included Cheng Pei-pei, Yueh Hua, Lo Lieh, Li Ching and Chen Hung-lieh, making him a key figure in the studio's training system. He died on 15 June 1981.
Coming from Tianyi Film Company in Shanghai, Ku Wen-chung directed a great many Cantonese martial-arts films in post-war Hong Kong and for years headed Shaw Brothers' Southern Drama Group over seven intakes, training actors such as Cheng Pei-pei and Yueh Hua, making him a key architect of the early Hong Kong studio's actor-training system.
Achievements
- 1931 · Acted in A Song of Spring in Shanghai
- 1955 · Directed the Cantonese film Fang Shiyu and Hu Huigan
- 1961 · Became director of Shaw Brothers' Southern Drama Group, overseeing actor training