Tony Leung

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is known in Hong Kong as Short Tony, not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka-Fai, nicknamed Tall Tony. Born on July 27, 1962, in a very humble family, his childhood was marked by tragedy, after his father, a compulsive gambler, abandoned him, his mother and his brothers. the.

“At school, when other children talked about their fathers, I felt very ashamed. I didn’t want to mention my father, so I rarely spoke to others,” Leung recalls. Traumatized by his father’s absence, he became a reserved boy, unable to express himself. “I really don’t know how to communicate with others because of my life and I get scared,” says Leung. He ended up becoming an actor precisely because of this problem. “Acting allowed me to express my feelings without having to feel ashamed. I can cry or break things on set, but no one knows if I’m just acting or what I’m really feeling inside.”

Although he had had to abandon his school studies due to lack of financial means, he managed to be recruited for the acting school of the TVB television channel. That same channel gave him a role in Wut Lik sap jat , a children’s series in which he shared the screen with Stephen Chow ( Shaolin Soccer ), who became a great friend of his. After appearing in various similar productions, he achieved some popularity.

His first major job was as one of the leads in Aching City , where he was the younger brother of a family during the violent Chinese crackdown of 1947. He played the younger brother, who was mute, trying to escape into the mountains to integrate into the a resistance movement. The film won the Golden Lion in Venice, and is the first part of Hou Hsiao-hsien ‘s trilogy on the history of Taiwan, complete with The Puppet Master and Good Men, Good Women .

John Woo was very happy with him, after giving him the lead role in A Bullet to the Head . He re-hired him to star in Hard Boiled , opposite Chow Yun-Fat , the other great of Hong Kong cinema.

Tony Leung’s career changed forever when a very young but brilliant director, Wong Kar Wai , then only a great promise, gave him a small role in Days of Being Wild , his second work. The film narrated the drama of a young man ( Andy Lau ) who discovers that the prostitute who had raised him was not his real mother, although Leung stood out especially as Chow Mo-Wan, a journalist and writer.

Kar Wai saw that Leung was capable of expressing anything, with enormous economy of means, and ended up turning him into his fetish actor. At his command was a policeman in crisis after being abandoned by his stewardess girlfriend, and who meets a strange girl in a restaurant, in Chungking Express , the film that established the director worldwide, thanks to the fact that he was sponsored by the passionate about Hong Kong cinema Quentin Tarantino . Kar Wai made him play a blind swordsman in Ashes of Time Redux , and made him gay on vacation with his partner in Buenos Aires, in Happy Together .

Kar Wai was so happy with the actor that he decided to bring back Chow Mo-Wan’s character, this time as the lead, in Deseando amar (In the Mood for Love) . The film, undoubtedly the director’s great masterpiece, focuses on Mo-wan’s marital problems, who feels lonely, and begins a great friendship with her neighbor, whose husband doesn’t pay attention to her either.

Mo-wan returned for the third time in 2046 , where he writes science fiction novels, while struggling to maintain various love relationships in an attempt to forget the woman from the previous film.

Although Tony Leung’s work with Wong Kar Wai leaves the rest of his filmography in the background, he has had some other outstanding work with first-rate oriental filmmakers. The most international Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Yimou , cast him as Broken Sword, one of the king’s enemies in Hero . He starred with Andy Lau in Dirty Play (2002) , the film versioned by Martin Scorsese in the much inferior The Departed . He had to be the policeman infiltrated in the Triads, and as expected, he nailed the character.

He especially proved his worth in his most unpleasant role, Mr. Yee, a sadistically edged collaborator with the Japanese, in Ang Lee ‘s Desire, Danger . John Woo cast him again to play Zhou Yu, viceroy of the kingdom of Wu, who with his ally and friend Zhuge Liang, military adviser of the kingdom of Xu, has to face a huge army in Red Cliff , which narrates events real historical.

In addition to being one of the great movie stars of his country, Tony Leung is passionate about music, has released several albums, and has sung on the soundtrack of some of his films, such as the aforementioned Dirty Game . He is married to Carina Lau , an actress who was the android of the 2046 train , with whom he had been a boyfriend for more than ten years.