Kitty Ting Hao (9 October 1939 – 23 May 1967), born Ting Po-yee, was a Mandarin-language film actress in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong and the eldest child of her family. Born in Macau, she came from a family of officials — her father, Ting Kei-tse, had served as a chief of staff — and spent her childhood following his postings across Guangdong's Shaoguan, the southwestern provinces and as far as Vietnam. After the Second World War she lived in Shanghai for several years, travelling between Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, and showed an early gift for languages and mimicry. She settled in Hong Kong in 1950 and, at fourteen or fifteen, entered the acting class of the International Film Distribution Company, the forerunner of Motion Picture & General Investment (MP & GI), where she was mentored by Yueh Feng and Chung Kai-man. One of Hong Kong's leading Mandarin studios of the period, MP & GI trained her in singing, dancing and performance, and she was cast mainly in light romantic comedies as an innocent, vivacious young girl. She made her screen debut in 1956 with Green Hills and Jade Valleys and became a star with Little Darling in 1958, nicknamed for her playful girl-next-door roles and counted among the studio's second-generation ingenues alongside Pai Lu-ming and So Fung. In eight years at MP & GI she appeared in roughly twenty Mandarin films, including Mother and Daughter (1960, directed by Tang Huang and co-starring Qiao Hong and Chang Yang), The Greatest Civil War on Earth (1961), A Fine Romance (1961) and Little Lotus (1963); she also sang film songs, recording numbers for A Fine Romance and Little Lotus in 1963. After breaking with the studio at the end of 1963 she married and turned freelance, making Cantonese films from her debut The Ghostly Murderer (1964) to her last film, Four Sisters (1966), more than thirty titles in all. She separated from her husband in 1965, moved to Los Angeles in 1966, and died of an overdose of sleeping pills on 23 May 1967, aged 27.
A representative of MP & GI's second generation of ingenues, Ting's playful screen persona shaped how postwar Mandarin cinema imagined the youth idol. Her move from Mandarin to Cantonese films reflects the traffic between the two industries in the early 1960s, and her early death remains a melancholy chapter of the studio star system.
Achievements
- 1956 · Made her screen debut in Green Valley
- 1958 · Rose to stardom with Little Darling, earning the nickname 'Little Darling'
- 1964 · Turned to Cantonese films, debuting with The Ghostly Murderer