Profile | ‘The other woman’, difficult: how Yammie Lam’s screen career soared before tabloid gossip and personal blows brought her low
- Yammie Lam rose through the ranks at Hong Kong broadcaster TVB alongside Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau, and appeared in films and a widely praised drama
- Tabloid newspapers, however, were not kind to Lam – who suffered from mental health problems and was painted as being difficult to work with
Lam’s story was a tragic one, like those of the most notable characters she played on the small screen, and helped shine a light on the ravages of mental illness.
Born in 1963 in Hong Kong, Lam was the youngest of three children. In interviews, she recounted how she was doted on by her father and how her family was very supportive of her decision to be an actress.
She became known as one of TVB’s “Five Beauties”, and was called “the most beautiful” face in the Hong Kong TV landscape.
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Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Lam’s small-screen career flourished. Her breakout role came in TVB drama series Looking Back in Anger (1989), in which she played Mui Fan-fong, the mother of the two main characters. Mui was wrongly convicted of murder and subsequently hanged.
While Lam only appeared in a few episodes as part of the backstory, her portrayal of a tortured soul touched the audience. The child actor who played her son, Gregory Lee, recalled in later interviews that Lam took care of him and gave him acting tips during filming.
Lam’s most notable television role was in The Greed of Man (1992), which is widely considered one of the best dramas ever produced by TVB. She played Lo Wai-ling, a former girlfriend of the villain Ting Hai (Adam Cheng Siu-chau) who then becomes the loyal partner of honest stockbroker Fong Chun-sun (Damian Lau Chung-yan).
Hong Kong’s tabloid newspapers were never kind to Lam. Early on in her career there were rumours that she would constantly be late to set, or that she refused to wear wigs or change her hairstyle for a role.
Lam was criticised for dating tycoon Cheng Yu-tung’s son Peter Cheng Kar-shing, who was then in a relationship with songstress Cally Kwong Mei-wan. Even though Kwong denied that Lam was the cause of her break-up with Cheng, Lam was for years afterwards called “the other woman”, even after she herself broke up with Cheng.
The actress lost both her parents in the mid-1990s and by 1998, cracks in her mental health had started to show.
It was reported that she suffered a concussion in September 1998; such a brain injury can exacerbate pre-existing mental illness or cause new symptoms. Not long after that, it was reported that Lam was suffering from depression.
In one of her last interviews, Lam said she was struggling to get work and that she was living off her savings. She said she had been swindled by a bank clerk but that she could not prove it to police.
Lam made a small comeback in the early 2000s and made her last television performance in 2004’s Love in a Miracle.
The tabloids continued to hound Lam, speculating about her mental health and finances and citing gambling debts and stock market losses.
In 2006, Lam filed for bankruptcy. She lived in public housing in Stanley and collected social welfare to the tune of HK$3,700 a month. A fan of hers would send her a few thousand dollars a month to help make ends meet.
In March 2013, Lam embraced Catholicism and was baptised at St Anne’s Church in Stanley, taking the name Maria. This spiritual journey seemed to offer her solace.
That same year, Lam’s name was back in tabloid headlines: Next Media released interview footage of her talking about an alleged rape; the perpetrator was not named.
In 2015, she was dogged by the paparazzi again, this time with shots of her looking like she was picking through rubbish bins.
Lam later made an appearance on Joey Leung Wing-chung’s talk show explaining that the press would not leave her alone that day. Unable to return home and with nowhere else to go, she said she sat down, exhausted, and used a nearby cup as an ashtray until the paparazzi left her alone.
On November 3, 2018, Lam was found dead in her flat in Stanley after friends had been unable to contact her for a few days. With the body partially decomposed when it was found, the cause of her death could not be determined.
A requiem mass was held for her six days later at St Anne’s Church. The service drew hundreds of fans and people from the entertainment industry, who paid tribute to Lam.
After her death, Lam’s neighbours were quoted as saying that, when she first moved in, she would scream a lot at night. Those who saw her every day during the last years of her life recalled the former actress being polite and keeping to herself.
