Kenneth Tsang


Kenneth Tsang Kong is a Hong Kong actor. Tsang's career has spanned 50 years and included a variety of acting roles. Tsang won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the 34th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2015. He left Mediacorp to continue to appear in films from his native Hong Kong.

Early life and education

Tsang Koon-yat was born in Shanghai with family roots in, Zhuhai, Guangdong.
Tsang attended high school in Wah Yan College, Hong Kong and then Wah Yan College, Kowloon. He attended McMurry College, Abilene, Texas for his freshman year and transferred to University of California, Berkeley, where he received a degree in architecture.

Career

Tsang returned to Hong Kong in the early 1960s as an architect but was bored by the work. His younger sister by 2 years, Jeanette Lin, was a film star at the time and provided Tsang with several connections in the industry which boosted his acting career.
Tsang's film debut was in the movie The Feud, when he was just 16, which was followed by a role in Who Isn't Romantic?. In the mid-1960s, Tsang starred in detective films and classic kung fu movies with Hong Kong teen idols Connie Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao. Tsang also appeared in a few Wong Fei-Hung movies in the late 1960s.
In 1986, Tsang worked as taxi cab owner, Ken, in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. Subsequent collaborations with Woo included the role of Ken in A Better Tomorrow 2 in 1987, police officer Danny Lee's murdered partner in The Killer in 1989, and the strict adoptive father of Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung and Cherie Chung in Once a Thief in 1991.
Tsang also filmed several Singaporean Chinese dramas during the 1990s, notably the 1995 epic The Teochew Family and The Unbeatables II in 1996.
Up to this point, Tsang had played roles in mainly Hong Kong movies. His first Hollywood film was The Replacement Killers, also the Hollywood debut of co-star Chow Yun-fat. Tsang appeared alongside Chow once again in Anna and the King as well as Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 2. Tsang played General Moon in the James Bond film Die Another Day, and he continues to appear in films from his native Hong Kong.

Personal life

Tsang was married three times, he first married a Malaysian Chinese and member of circus troupe Lan Di in 1969 and have a son. They divorced ten years later in 1979 and his son left to live with his mother. They have since resided in Vancouver, Canada.
Tsang married columnist and model Barbara Tang in 1980, they have a daughter Musette Tsang Mo-suet. Tsang and Tang divorced in 1990.
In 1994 Tsang married Chiao Chiao, a Chinese-born Taiwanese actress.

Filmography