Lou Hung (1928–2015), born Zeng Gulan, was a native of Xiamen, Fujian, where she grew up, and the sister of the actress Lou Fen. Passionate about performing from childhood, she acted with a school troupe and, during the War of Resistance against Japan, on theatre stages, becoming famous early in Xiamen under the nickname 'Miss Fujian'. In 1947 two overseas Chinese entrepreneurs from the Philippines, Esteban Ngo and Dai Youmin, set up the Hsin Kuang Film Company in Hong Kong and held open casting for actresses who could speak the Amoy dialect; Lou was chosen and came from Xiamen to film A Belated Encounter (1948), which proved a hit when it premiered in Taiwan. The Air is Cleared (1948) followed and became the first Amoy-dialect film released publicly in Hong Kong. She settled in Hong Kong and made her first Mandarin film, Hero of Our Time (1948), which brought her to the attention of Yung Hwa Motion Picture Industries; hired as a regular player, she appeared in Prisoner of Love (1951), A Moment of Bliss and Dog Murderer (both 1952) and Wife and Husband (1953), among many others. After her contract ended she took only a few Mandarin roles, such as Siren (1956) for Shaw & Sons and The Blood of Patriotic Souls (1957), and otherwise starred in over a dozen Amoy-dialect films, including Meng Lijun (1955), Romance of Western Chamber, Meeting on the Magpies Bridge and The Champion Beauty Falls for the Oil Vendor (all 1956), and, with her sister Lou Fen, Dream of the Red Mansion (1956). She also starred in Intelligence Trader (1959) in Taiwan. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s Hong Kong produced more than two hundred films in the Amoy dialect, distributed mainly to Southeast Asia and Taiwan but seldom screened locally, and Lou was among the first of that group to become a star. She married in 1958 and retired, and died in Hong Kong in 2015.
Lou Hung was a leading actress of Hong Kong's late-1940s Amoy-dialect cinema; The Air is Cleared, in which she starred, was the first such film publicly released in the territory. Moving to Yung Hwa, she carried Mandarin-studio experience back into Amoy-dialect production, bridging the two strands of Hong Kong film at a time when Amoy pictures circulated mainly through Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Achievements
- 1948 · Starred in the Amoy-dialect film A Belated Encounter, which was well received at its Taiwan premiere.
- 1948 · Starred in The Air is Cleared, the first Amoy-dialect film publicly released in Hong Kong.
- 1951 · Signed by Yung Hwa as a regular player and appeared in the Mandarin film Prisoner of Love.