Andy Lau

Andy Lau Tak-wah (; born Lau Fook-wing; 27 September 1961), is a Hong Kong actor and singer. He was named one of the Five Tiger Generals of TVB in the 1980s as well as one of the Four Heavenly Kings in the 1990s. Lau won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor three times, the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actor twice, and was entered into the Guinness World Records for the "Most Awards Won by a Cantopop Male Artist" in 2000, with a total of 444 music awards by 2006. In 2018, Lau became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2024, Lau was elected vice chairman of the 11th China Film Association. Over a career of four decades, Lau has been one of the most commercially and critically successful artists in the Chinese-speaking world. Early life Lau was born Lau Fook-wing in Tai Po, British Hong Kong, to fireman Lau Lai (1934–2023). He is the fourth of six siblings and has three elder sisters, one younger sister, and a younger brother named Lau Tak-sing. Although his family was wealthy due to his grandfather being a landowner with farmland and villages, his father moved them to the slums of Diamond Hill when he was six years old so he could receive a bilingual education to improve his English. The area was full of wooden houses, which burnt down when he was eleven. During his childhood, Lau had to fetch water for his family up to eight times a day as their house lacked plumbing. He graduated from a Band One secondary school, Ho Lap College in San Po Kong, Kowloon. He also practices Chinese calligraphy and hair styling. He was raised in a nominally Buddhist household and is a follower of the Lingyan Mountain Temple in Taiwan.

Career Acting In 1980, Lau enrolled in TVB's actor training program and graduated the next year, signing a contract with TVB. He was propelled to fame by the TVB series The Emissary (1982). His popularity soared the next year with his role as Yang Guo in the TVB wuxia series The Return of the Condor Heroes; at the end of the year, Lau was featured in the TVB Anniversary Gala Show, alongside Tony Leung, Michael Miu, Felix Wong, and Kent Tong. Since then they were known as the "Five Tiger Generals of TVB".

Meanwhile, Lau also started his film career. He made a guest appearance in one of Susanna Kwan's music videos in 1981 and caught the eye of the manager Teddy Robin, who gave Lau his first minor role in the film, Once Upon a Rainbow. Lau then landed a role in Ann Hui's 1982 film, Boat People.

TVB insisted on a binding five-year exclusive contract, which Lau declined to sign, leading to his blacklisting by the network. In the late '80s, Lau departed from TVB and shifted his focus towards films. He won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor award that year for Running Out of Time. In 2004, he won the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actor for his performance in Infernal Affairs III.

Since the early 21st century, Lau has started working with filmmakers from China and beyond, notably in Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Feng Xiaogang's A World Without Thieves (2004). In 2006 he starred in the pan-Asian blockbuster A Battle of Wits (2006), followed by a series of big-budget historical films such as The Warlords (2007), Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (2008), and Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010).

In 2005, Lau received the "No.1 Box office Actor 1985–2005" award of Hong Kong, yielding a box office total of HKD 1,733,275,816 for shooting 108 films in the past 20 years. In 2007, Lau also received the "Nielsen Box Office Star of Asia" award by the Nielsen Company (ACNielsen). which earned him another Best Actor Award at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2018. In February 2021, Lau reunited with Tony Leung since the Infernal Affairs series in the action film The Goldfinger.

Film production In 1991, Lau set up his own film production company, Teamwork Motion Pictures, which in 2002 was renamed to Focus Group Holdings Limited. He was awarded the "Asian Filmmaker of the Year" in the Pusan International Film Festival in 2006. The following year, he released the single "The Days We Spent Together" which topped Hong Kong's music charts and was an international hit across Asia. The song was lauded by Time Out which described its popularity as "practically a national anthem" and "one of the most notable hits" in Lau's career. His subsequent albums brought him further recognition spawning hit singles such as Ice Rain (1993), Forget Love Potion (1994), and Stupid Fellow (1998). His popularity as a music artist was such that Lau was dubbed as one of the Cantopop Four Heavenly Kings along with Jacky Cheung, Aaron Kwok, and Leon Lai.

At the 2008 Summer Olympics, Lau sang "Please Stay, Guests From Afar" alongside Jackie Chan and Emil Chau during its closing ceremony. In addition, Lau, who has been supporting disabled athletes in Hong Kong for more than a decade, was appointed as the Goodwill ambassador for the 2008 Summer Paralympics. He led other performers in singing and performing the song "Everyone is No.1" at the Beijing National Stadium before the 2008 Paralympics opening ceremony began. He also sang the theme song Flying with the Dream with Han Hong during the Paralympics opening ceremony on 6 September 2008.

In addition to singing in Cantonese and Mandarin, Lau has also sung in other languages such as English, Japanese, and Taiwanese Hokkien. He has held concerts in Asia, North America, Western Europe, and Oceania, and toured throughout mainland China in summer 2024.