Ray Lui, born in Vietnam in 1956 to an overseas-Chinese family, moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1968. After completing the acting course of Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) in 1976 he signed on as a contract artiste. He became a star in 1980 playing Ting Lik in the gangster saga The Bund, reprising the role in two sequels that same year and establishing himself as one of the station's leading men; other series followed, including a 1981 martial-arts drama, Man's Man (1982) and a 1985 adaptation of Jin Yong's Snow Mountain Flying Fox. While under contract he occasionally made films, his first being Tsui Hark's Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980) as a policeman nicknamed 'Grease Fly'; he also teamed with Kent Cheng and Danny Lee in the crime film The Goldfinger (1980) and further police pictures in 1981 and 1982, and took second lead in a 1983 sci-fi film. Leaving TVB in 1989, he turned full-time to film, starring for Golden Harvest in pictures such as a 1989 comedy. In 1991 he gained forty pounds to play the title gangster in To Be Number One for producer Johnny Mak, winning praise for his commitment and helping the film take HK$38 million while igniting a vogue for gangster biographies; he went on to play mob bosses in similar films and took the lead as Xiang Yu in a 1994 historical picture. From 1996 he concentrated on mainland television, returning occasionally for Hong Kong films such as Flash Point (2007), Firestorm (2013), Our Time Will Come (2017) and A Beautiful Moment (2018).
Lui became a leading TVB star of the 1980s as Ting Lik in The Bund, and his weight-gain performance in To Be Number One sparked a wave of gangster biographies; later stretching to historical leads such as Xiang Yu, he is one of the few Hong Kong performers to bridge television and film so durably.
Achievements
- 1980 · Became famous playing Ting Lik in the television series The Bund
- 1991 · Gained forty pounds to star in Johnny Mak's To Be Number One, igniting a vogue for gangster biographies
- 1994 · Played the lead role of Xiang Yu in a 1994 historical film