Tony Leung Ka-fai was born in Hong Kong on 1 February 1958 and grew up in North Point Estate on Hong Kong Island. His father was a clerk and his mother sold tickets at a cinema in Causeway Bay, so he often saw films for free. He attended Rosaryhill School, Salesian School and Wellington College before studying graphic design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, where he was once a sprint record holder. In 1980 he went with a friend to the auditions for TVB's actors' training class and was himself admitted, to its tenth intake; he and Andy Lau were the two most visible extras, once playing Chow Yun-fat's henchmen in a television serial. Dismissed within a year for indiscipline, he started a magazine of his own, doing the interviews, photography, editing and advertising single-handed. Leung chose the director Li Han-hsiang's daughter as a cover model and through her met Li, then preparing Burning of the Imperial Palace. Li invited him to Beijing to shave his head and play the Xianfeng Emperor in Burning of the Imperial Palace and Reign Behind a Curtain (both 1983). Speaking no Mandarin, he could not talk with Liu Xiaoqing, who played Cixi, and relied on cues she devised. In 1984 he won Best Actor at the 3rd Hong Kong Film Awards for Reign Behind a Curtain, becoming at 26 the youngest winner in the award's history, and was also nominated for Best New Performer; he later said he did not yet know how to act and simply followed the director's example. Because both films were shot on the mainland, the Taiwan authorities blacklisted him and his films could not be released there, at a time when Taiwan was the largest Chinese-language market, so Hong Kong producers dared not cast him. To make a living he sold leather goods from unlicensed stalls at Shek O and, when trade was poor, in Causeway Bay, taking only scattered roles with Lo Wei's and Shaw Brothers' studios and Li's New Kunlun. After martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987 the ban ended; he at once co-starred with Chow Yun-fat in Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire, which took over HK$30 million, and became a leading man known for urbane, middle-class and intellectual parts. He then won Best Actor at the 27th Golden Horse Awards for Farewell China (1990), opposite Maggie Cheung. In 1992 came another peak: he starred in the French film L'Amant, which broke French films' two-year box-office record, and played Inspector Lui in 92 Legendary La Rose Noire, a comic turn that was both a critical and a popular success, winning him another Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor and the Hong Kong Artist of the Year award for acting. His range takes in serious works such as Ashes of Time (1994) and The Christ of Nanjing (1995) and comedies such as He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father (1993), as well as gangster chiefs in Island of Greed (1997), Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone (2000) and Election (2005), each played differently. In 2006 his performance in Election brought a third Best Actor award, fourteen years after his previous win. Outside Hong Kong he has been much in demand in Taiwan and on the mainland: in Taiwan he appeared with Sylvia Chang in Chen Kunhou's 1990 film and led Chen Kuo-fu's horror Double Vision (2002); on the mainland he starred with Gong Li in Sun Zhou's Zhou Yu's Train (2003) and in Lost in Beijing (2007). In 1999, through Stanley Kwan, he met Yu Lik-wai and financed Yu's directorial debut, Love Will Tear Us Apart, which was selected for the Cannes competition. He has worked steadily since, in Men Suddenly in Black (2003), Throw Down (2004) and Bodyguards and Assassins (2009). He won a fourth Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor for Cold War (2012), and later appeared in The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2015), Our Time Will Come (2017) and Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch (2019). In 2019 he wrote, directed and starred in Midnight Diner, his first film as a director. In 2026 he won a fifth Best Actor award at the Hong Kong Film Awards for the 2025 action film. He is the only actor to have won Best Actor in every decade from the 1980s to the 2020s.
Tony Leung Ka-fai's range spans historical dramas, gangster films and comedy. He is the youngest Best Actor winner in the history of the Hong Kong Film Awards and the only actor to have taken that prize in every decade from the 1980s to the 2020s. His 1992 appearance in the French film L'Amant made him internationally known.
Achievements
- 1984 · Won Best Actor at the 3rd Hong Kong Film Awards for Reign Behind a Curtain, becoming the award's youngest winner at 26.
- 1990 · Won Best Actor at the 27th Golden Horse Awards for Farewell China.
- 1993 · Won Best Actor at the 12th Hong Kong Film Awards for playing Lui Kei in 92 Legendary La Rose Noire.
- 2006 · Won a third Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor for Election, fourteen years after his previous win.
- 2026 · Won a fifth Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor for his role in the 2025 action film.