Raymond Wong, born 8 April 1946 and originally named Wong Pak-ming, is a Hong Kong producer, director, screenwriter and actor who has also written lyrics and music. He grew up in a tong lau tenement on Queen's Road West in Sheung Wan, the eldest of several children, his family from Heshan in Guangdong. After finishing school in 1957 he studied at the night school of St John's College, where he took part in drama. Leaving secondary night school at seventeen, he became a junior clerk at an Indian trading firm and by twenty-four was a manager handling compradore business; in the evenings he worked as a broadcaster at the Green Village radio station in Macau, performing serialised fiction. When the 1967 riots shut the station down, he and friends formed an amateur theatre group that staged public performances at the Hong Kong City Hall for ten years, and he was introduced to TVB for guest roles before becoming one of the writers of the 1976 series Wong Fei-hung. In 1977 he helped finance his first film, then wrote several period comic kung-fu scripts and formed a company with Karl Maka and Dean Shek. When Cinema City was founded he became one of its three bosses and a core member of its seven-man team, chiefly writing scripts such as All the Wrong Clues (1981), Aces Go Places (1982) and All the Wrong Spies (1983). In 1984 Happy Ghost, which he created and headlined, took more than HK$17 million on a small budget and grew into a series; his 1988 Eighth Happiness set a box-office record with over HK$37 million. He founded Mandarin Films in 1991, making Chinese New Year hits such as All's Well, Ends Well (1992) and It's a Wonderful Life (1994). Mandarin Entertainment listed on the main board in 2001 and produced Ip Man (2008); he stepped down as executive director in 2009, founded Pegasus Motion Pictures with his son and, as producer of Ip Man, won Best Film at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards.
As a driving force at Cinema City, Raymond Wong produced a run of record-breaking hits that established the Hong Kong Chinese New Year comedy, a formula still used at Lunar New Year today. He later built Mandarin Films and Pegasus, producing the Ip Man series.
Achievements
- 1982 · Wrote Cinema City's Aces Go Places, which became that year's top-grossing Hong Kong film.
- 1984 · Created and starred in Happy Ghost, which took more than HK$17 million on a modest budget and grew into a series.
- 2009 · As producer he won Best Film at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards for Ip Man.