Wang Lai, born Wang Delan into an official's family and raised in Beijing though of Shandong stock, graduated in 1944 from the girls' middle school attached to Beijing Normal University and married He Bin, head of the Shanghai Film Workers Drama Troupe. In 1949 the couple founded the Huaguang Troupe, where she took the stage name Wang Lai and won notice as the Empress Dowager in the historical play Anecdotes of the Qing Palace. She entered films in 1951 with The Shrine, which was banned, and settled in Hong Kong in August 1952; a stage script she brought, Mr Handsome, was adapted into a 1953 film in which she also acted. Over the following half-century she appeared in some two hundred films, earning the title actress with a thousand faces, and worked for such studios as Swank, Yung Hwa, Asia, Hsin Hwa and Shaw Brothers, in titles like Spring Is in the Air (1954), Tradition (1955) and The Long Lane (1956). While shooting Scarlet Doll (1958) in Japan she was recruited by Robert Chung to MP & GI, for which and its successor Cathay she made more than fifty films between 1957 and 1969, among them Golden Lotus (1957), Her Tender Heart (1959), The Bedside Story (1960), The Wild, Wild Rose (1960) and Father Takes a Bride (1963). Her performance in Father and Son (1963) brought her first Golden Horse Award for best supporting actress, at the third edition. Freelancing from the 1970s, she made over fifty more films for Shaw Brothers and Taiwan's Central Motion Pictures, including The Call Girls (1973) and Dream of the Red Chamber (1977), and won the same Golden Horse award three further times, at the 18th, 25th and 28th editions, for Unsinkable Miss Calabash (1981), Third Bridge (1988) and Pushing Hands (1992). She died on 28 September 2016.
Across half a century and nearly two hundred films for the major studios of Hong Kong and Taiwan, Wang Lai won the Golden Horse Award for best supporting actress a record four times, her 'actress with a thousand faces' reputation setting a benchmark for supporting performance in Mandarin cinema.
Achievements
- 1963 · Won her first Golden Horse Award for best supporting actress, at the third edition, for Father and Son
- 1981 · Won best supporting actress at the 18th Golden Horse Awards for Unsinkable Miss Calabash
- 1992 · Won best supporting actress at the 28th Golden Horse Awards for Pushing Hands