THIS YEAR LOOKS set to be a watershed for award-winning actor and musician Anthony Wong Chau-sang. Not just because he has a new album, Bad Taste, released next week but because he hopes this will be the year he finally traces his long-lost father.
The main catalyst for change is Wong's realisation that, after 20 years, the film industry is no longer his preferred medium. Wong's still working in movies and will be seen next alongside Jackie Chan in the US$35 million (HK$273 million) Highbinders, currently in production. But family and music are the top priorities now for the man whose portrayal of a cold-blooded murderer in the 1993 film Untold Story earned him the title of best actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards the following year.
Looking back over his film career, Wong admits not every movie he has made was a winner and that he took many inferior roles simply to pay the bills. 'Many of the films I have been in were low-budget productions [The Story Of Prostitute, Return To Dark],' Wong says. 'Some scripts were terrible. But I had no choice. I had to do it for the sake of my family.'
Wong has often been cast as an angry man, a gangster or thug. In real life, he hardly seems easygoing and admits he has lived under the shadow of an unhappy childhood. Born to a British father and a Chinese mother in Hong Kong in 1961, he says his father abandoned them soon after he was born. 'The father's name in my birth certificate was left blank. I only inherited my mother's surname,' he says, bitterly. 'I had nobody when I was young. I had no friends, no good teachers, nothing except a good mother - maybe because I'm an Eurasian and in those days mixed-blood kids were seen as aliens by both local Chinese and Westerners.'
His mother brought him up on her meagre earnings from singing Cantonese opera. From an early age, he knew academic work would take second place to earning a living so he left school to help his mother out financially.
'I was not good at studying at all,' he says. 'When I finished primary school I was already 15 [the usual age is 12]. Then I did a bit of secondary school to fill the time until I was 16 and could work legally.'