Andy Lau

Name: Andy Lau
Chinese Name: 刘德华
Profession: Singer, actor, performer
Country: Hong Kong, China
Birthday: 27th September 1961
Height: 174cm
Weight: 64kg

The People’s Idol, Andy Lau Tak-Wah, was born on September 27, 1961. Over the years, Lau has solidified his position as not only a superstar and Heavenly Sky King, but also as the hardest working entertainer in Hong Kong. His dedication and work ethic has won the respect and admiration of fans and critics alike. In little more than twenty years time, Lau has made over one hundred films and has maintained a successful singing career, to boot.

Lau joined TVB’s Artist Training Program in 1981. He was a fairly popular TV star until contract disputes led to him to be put in the “freezer” (they barred him from working). This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it allowed him to focus on developing his film career. Working extensively with populist director Wong Jing, he soon became a bankable star. He also appeared as gangster Wah-Dee in A Moment of Romance (1990), a role which has come to be regarded as Lau’s most career-defining.

However, for many years the one thing Lau really wanted was to be taken seriously as an actor. He was previously nominated for various awards for his roles in As Tears Go By (1988) and Full Throttle (1995), but it wasn’t until 1999 that Lau finally got the recognition he so craved. He was awarded with a Best Actor Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards for his performance in Johnnie To’s Running Out of Time. In 2003, Lau won the award a second time, for his physically and emotionally demanding role as “Biggie”, a monk cursed with the ability to see the karmic fates of those around him, in Johnnie To’s Running on Karma (2003). In 2002, the Golden Horse Best Actor Award eluded Lau by the slimmest of margins (he lost by one vote to his IA co-star Tony Leung) for Infernal Affairs (2002), but the second time proved to be the charm and Lau was finally able to add the Golden Horse to his ginormous collection of awards when he won for his reprisal of the duplicitious triad mole Lau Kin-Ming in Infernal Affairs 3 (2003).

In recent years, Lau has also tried his hand at business, and started his own production company named Teamwork. Among the films produced by Teamwork have been the critically-acclaimed features Made in Hong Kong (1997) and The Longest Summer (1998), both directed by Fruit Chan. More recently, Lau has continued to demonstrate his ability as a box-office guarantee, headlining the Media Asia productions Infernal Affairs (2002), Cat and Mouse (2003), and Infernal Affairs 3 (2003). (Yinique 2004).

He has since appeared in more than 100 films, and has a huge fan base throughout Asia with the success of both his onscreen performance and his musical career. Andy Lau is best known for his (often) recurring roles in the King of Gamblers.

Lau is known to some more for his good looks than for his strengths of acting, though he has answered his critics since the turn of the century in a series of critically acclaimed movies, especially those directed by Johnnie To. His first major acting prizes came with A Fighter’s Blue and Running Out of Time in 2000. In 2004 he won the prestigious Golden Horse Award for his performance in Infernal Affairs 3, a popular film which is to be remade in Hollywood as The Departed starring Matt Damon as the police mole Lau played. Americans may also be familiar with his performance in House of Flying Daggers.

Andy Lau was recently awarded “No.1 Box-office Actor 1985-2005″ of Hong Kong, yielding a total box office of HKD1,733,275,816 for shooting 108 films in the past 20 years. It is compared to the first runner-up Stephen Chow Sing-Chi (HKD1,317,452,311) and second runner-up Jackie Chan (HKD894,090,962). “I’ve never imagined that would be as much as 1.7 billion!” He told the reporters.

He is also one of the most successful Chinese music celebrities, with an extensive list of Cantonese and Mandarin hits to his credit. His first music contract came in 1985, but his singing career reached stellar status in 1990 with the release of the album entitled “Would it be possible?”, and his subsequent releases only solidified his status as a highly marketable singer. Andy Lau along with Jacky Cheung, Aaron Kwok and Leon Lai also named as the Cantopop Four Great Heavenly Kings (四大天王 Cantonese: sêi daài tïn wong, Pinyin: sì dà tiān wáng).

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