Wong Cheuk-hon (25 January 1920 – 8 October 2004), born in Chaozhou, Guangdong, took a law degree at Koumin University and worked as a teacher and then as deputy editor-in-chief of a Nanjing newspaper before coming to Hong Kong in 1949. He managed the China Theatre and ran a company distributing Cantonese films, then founded Liberty Film in 1952, whose first Mandarin production The Secret Life of Lady So Lee (1953) introduced Helen Li Mei. He set up actor-training classes and one pupil, Jeanette Lin Tsui, became a star in Sweet Seventeen (1954). He was the first Hong Kong filmmaker to shoot in Taiwan, making films such as Princess of Sun Moon Lake (1956) and The Mermaid Princess (1957); Miss Chow Shun (1958), shot on a local sugarcane plantation, lost heavily through poor overseas distribution. In 1959 he founded Lan Kwong to make Cantonese films, releasing fifty-three titles that were mostly urban satires of different walks of life and launching Ting Ying, Paul Chu and Alan Tang, who was still a student when he took the lead in The Student Prince (1964). In 1967 he established First Film Organisation, moved to Taiwan and focused on martial arts pictures, beginning with Crazy Swordsman (1968) and recruiting Jimmy Wang Yu, Chen Sing, Polly Shang-kuan and Kurata Yasuaki, while also producing song-and-dance and wenyi films and teaming up with King Hu on Legend of the Mountain (1979). The Flaming Mountain (1962) was Hong Kong's first Cantonese film in Eastmancolor and widescreen. He began directing in 1958 and made fourteen films in all, and in the 1970s and 1980s ran cinemas, including a circuit in Taiwan and houses showing Chinese films in six cities in the US and Canada; he scaled back in the 1980s, closing his Taiwan distribution in 1986 and the theatre chain in 1987. He received the lifetime achievement award at the 30th Golden Horse Awards in 1993 and died in Hong Kong on 8 October 2004, aged eighty-four. Because he also wrote, directed, shot and edited, he was nicknamed the 'master of ten skills'.
Wong Cheuk-hon worked across production, distribution and exhibition in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and was one of the few filmmakers to carry the Hong Kong studio model to Taiwan. He launched performers such as Helen Li Mei, Jeanette Lin Tsui, Ting Ying and Alan Tang and helped bring Taiwan's martial-arts wave into the market, shaping the commercial production and sales networks of Chinese-language cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Achievements
- 1952 · Founded Liberty Film, releasing its first production The Secret Life of Lady So Lee the following year.
- 1962 · Produced The Flaming Mountain, Hong Kong's first Cantonese film shot in Eastmancolor and widescreen.
- 1993 · Received the lifetime achievement award at the 30th Golden Horse Awards.