Cheung Wood-yau, born Cheung Kin-yue in Guangzhou to a Meixian family, worked as a labourer and a cinema ticket-seller before graduating from the second class of the Cantonese opera training institute run by Guangzhou's Bahe Guild Hall. Spotted by the celebrated actor Pak Yuk-tong, he became a Cantonese opera xiaosheng and performed alongside stars such as Sit Kok-sin and Ma Si-tsang. He entered the Hong Kong film industry in 1939, immediately taking leading male roles in films including Smashing the Bronze Net Array (1939), and appeared in more than twenty pictures before the war, such as Three Teasings of the White Chrysanthemum (1939) and He Came Back Again (1940), becoming a well-known leading man. After the Japanese occupation he returned to the mainland to perform opera, and after the war resumed his film career in Hong Kong; his two-part Shiu Yuet-bak (1949) set box-office records and confirmed his stardom, followed by hits such as Black Paradise (1950) and Red and White Peony (1952). In 1952 he helped found the Union Film Enterprise, dedicated to quality Cantonese pictures, for which he appeared in Family (1953), Spring (1953), Autumn (1954) and many more. In 1954 he co-founded another company whose output included the classic The Great Devotion (1960), written and directed by his son Chor Yuen, and in the 1960s he planned productions for Chor Yuen's Rose Film Company. He joined television as an actor in 1976, retired from the screen in the early 1980s and died of a heart attack in Hong Kong on 10 December 1985.
Cheung Wood-yau was a leading Cantonese-screen actor of post-war Hong Kong; as a co-founder of Union Film in 1952 he pushed for higher-quality Cantonese pictures, set box-office records with Shiu Yuet-bak and helped bring classics such as The Great Devotion to the screen, shaping the golden age of Cantonese cinema.
Achievements
- 1939 · Made his film debut as a leading man in Smashing the Bronze Net Array
- 1949 · Starred in the two-part Shiu Yuet-bak, which set box-office records
- 1952 · Co-founded the Union Film Enterprise to produce quality Cantonese pictures