Wang Yueting, a native of Shaoxing in Zhejiang, grew up in Shanghai. A military-academy graduate who had served as an artillery company commander, he led a theatre troupe performing spoken drama in Chongqing during the war and occasionally wrote stage plays. After the peace he returned to Shanghai and worked as a director for the Yue opera stage; he left the army in 1950 and moved to Hong Kong the following year, entering films as an extra and script clerk for five or six years. Between 1956 and 1962 he wrote numerous screenplays for Shaw and Sons and Shaw Brothers, his first being a 1958 release. When The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), adapted from a Peking-opera favourite, won Best Picture and other prizes at the 6th Asian Film Festival — and earned him a Best Screenplay award — his name was made. Scripts followed thick and fast, many directed by Li Han-hsiang, including Rear Entrance (1960), which won Best Picture at the 7th Asian Film Festival and another Best Screenplay prize for Wang, as well as The Enchanting Shadow (1960) and Empress Wu Tse-tien (1963). Other notable screenplays include a 1959 title and The Pistol (1961). He was assistant director on his own Empress Wu, then wrote and directed three comedies between 1961 and 1963. In 1962, while directing The Matchmaker, he was in a car crash that left him with concussion, and the film was shelved, later renamed and finished by another director with Wang as writer. He joined Li Han-hsiang's Grand Motion Picture Company in Taiwan in 1963 but produced nothing more; returning to Hong Kong, he struggled and worked as a contract actor in pictures such as The Warlord (1972). He died in 1974 from an overdose of sleeping pills.
Among Shaw Brothers' key screenwriters of the early 1960s, Wang was Li Han-hsiang's frequent collaborator; his prize-winning scripts for The Kingdom and the Beauty and Rear Entrance underpinned the huangmei and literary pictures of the era, and he was central to adapting Peking-opera material to the screen.
Achievements
- 1959 · Won Best Screenplay at the 6th Asian Film Festival for The Kingdom and the Beauty
- 1960 · Won Best Screenplay at the 7th Asian Film Festival for Rear Entrance
- 1961 · Wrote and directed the comedy Immortals, Tigers and Dogs