Tu Guangqi, originally named Tu Guangqi, was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang on 26 August 1914 and graduated in the first class of the National Drama School in Nanjing. In 1937 he joined the Shanghai Theatre Society, acting on stage in A Spray of Tears and Sunrise, and in 1939 he made his screen debut in Ge Nen Niang, a period film (also known as The Last Grief of the Ming) by the Shanghai Huacheng company. He later became an assistant director to Zhu Shilin, with whom he co-directed Meng Lijun (1940), and then directed New Fisherman's Song (1941) on his own, winning favourable notices. During Shanghai's 'orphan island' period he made other films for the China United Production company, and after the war he scored a major hit with the thriller The Number One (1946). Moving to Hong Kong in 1949, he directed for Shaw, Xinhua, Yonghua, MP & GI and Cathay. In the early 1950s he was a key director at Shaw and Sons, specialising in melodramas that he frequently wrote, including Modern Madame (1951), Songstress (1953), A New Romance of the Western Chamber (1953) and The Story of Qiu Jin (1953), and he also directed for other studios. He moved into martial-arts pictures in the 1960s, and after joining Cathay in 1967 directed The First Sword (1967), Lotus Camp (1969) and Warriors' Blood (1970). Besides Cantonese and Chaozhou-dialect films, he directed more than eighty pictures in all, his last being Crush (1972), and took a cameo in King Hu's The Valiant Ones (1975). A martial-arts novelist as well as a filmmaker, he settled in the United States in 1973, began publishing his memoirs in the magazine Dacheng in 1974, and died in Los Angeles on 30 May 1980.
Tu Guangqi was among the prolific Shanghai-trained directors who anchored Hong Kong's studio system after 1949, making more than eighty films for Shaw, MP & GI and Cathay across melodrama, martial-arts and dialect cinema. His post-war hit The Number One (1946) had already shown his commercial instinct before he moved south.
Achievements
- 1940 · Co-directed Meng Lijun with Zhu Shilin.
- 1946 · Directed The Number One, a critical and commercial success in Shanghai.
- 1949 · Moved to Hong Kong and directed for Shaw, MP & GI and Cathay, making more than eighty films in all.