Loke Wan Tho (14 June 1915 – 20 June 1964) was born in Kuala Lumpur to Loke Yew, a leading Malayan businessman, and was educated at the University of Cambridge, taking a BA and a master's in history. President of the wealthy Cathay Organisation, he was also chairman of Malayan Banking and Malayan Airways and a noted philanthropist who supported education and the arts in Malaya and Singapore; he was conferred honours in Malaya, Britain and Japan, and sat on the boards of the Rank and Fox film companies. In 1955 his company bought Lee Tso-yung's Yung Hwa studio, and in 1956 he merged it with the International Films Distributing Agency to form Motion Picture and General Investment Co. Ltd, or Cathay (MP & GI), becoming chairman with Chung Kai-man as general manager. Combining production, distribution and a cinema chain on a Hollywood model, he gathered writers and directors such as Stephen Soong, Doe Ching, Evan Yang and Eileen Chang and stars including Lin Dai and Grace Chang. Cathay's successes included Our Sister Hedy (1957), named Best Film at the fifth Asian Film Festival in 1958, and Sun, Moon and Star (1961), which won Best Feature Film at the first Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan in 1962, while its distribution arm prospered across Southeast Asia. Loke was also a photographer: he published A Company of Birds (1959) and, with Malcolm MacDonald, Angkor (1958), and collected more than 500 prints by leading photographers, now in the National Gallery Singapore; he donated S$300,000 towards a science building at Nanyang University. In June 1964 he attended the 11th Asian Film Festival in Taiwan and was received by Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling; on 20 June, flying from Taichung to Taipei on Civil Air Transport flight B-908, he was killed when the hijacked aircraft crashed in a paddy field. All 57 people aboard died, and that year's Golden Horse Awards were cancelled; his star is the 38th on Hong Kong's Avenue of Stars.
Loke brought modern studio practice and theatre-chain distribution to Hong Kong. Founded by him in the mid-1950s, Cathay took Asian Film Festival and Golden Horse prizes with films such as Our Sister Hedy and Sun, Moon and Star, and its rise prompted Shaw to build a Hong Kong studio in 1957, reshaping the post-war industry into a contest between the two companies.
Achievements
- 1955 · Bought the Yung Hwa studio and, the next year, reorganised it with the International Films Distributing Agency into Cathay (MP & GI)
- 1958 · Cathay's Our Sister Hedy won Best Film at the fifth Asian Film Festival
- 1962 · Cathay's Sun, Moon and Star won Best Feature Film at the first Golden Horse Awards