Profile | ‘Every day I’m striving’: Hong Kong filmmaker Sandra Ng’s evolution from playing the ‘funny hag’ to lauded producer
- Ng broke through in the late 1980s acting alongside Stephen Chow. Success followed with a string of comedies in the 90s, but she was typecast in ugly roles
- She started producing films and taking on more serious roles, and awards followed – paving the way for a career that is very much alive today
Sandra Ng Kwan-yue has been a respected film actress and producer for so long, it may be easy to forget that she started as a comedian who was used to playing “unattractive” supporting roles on TV in the 1980s.
Ng was born in 1965 the daughter of actor and TV presenter Kenneth Ng Kam-tsun (better known as Ha Chun Chau), and attended the prestigious St Stephen’s Girls’ College, one of the oldest schools in Hong Kong. However, she was never very invested in school and flopped in her HKCEE high-school leaving exams.
Upon graduation, Ng quickly signed with TVB and made an impression on the variety show Enjoy Yourself Tonight. She took on mostly minor and background roles in TV dramas in the mid-1980s before switching to film at the end of the decade. But her hard work and patience were not for nought.
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She went on to play more memorable roles in the early 1990s; many of the films she featured in during this period, such as All for the Winner (1990), Gamblers Part III: Back to Shanghai (1991) and All’s Well, Ends Well (1992), are considered comedy classics today.
By the mid-1990s, Ng was a successful comedian who at one point “shot six films in a year” and “once had to get to three different sets in 24 hours”, as she later recalled.
However, she was typecast as, in her words, “the funny hag”. Possibly feeling a bit jaded and pigeonholed, Ng decided to step up her game.
Aside from her foray into singing, at which she was moderately successful, and hosting radio shows – so well received that it has become a significant part of her career – Ng reached a turning point with the 1996 film 4 Faces of Eve, an experimental drama she produced and funded and in which she played the leading role.
Comprising four short stories, respectively about a lonely sex worker, a cheated wife, a murderous lesbian and a woman seeking a new life, the anthology feature was co-directed by Eric Kot Man-fai, Jan Lam Hoi-fung and Kam Kwok-leung, with Christopher Doyle as cinematographer.
While the project got Ng into debt, it also led to her first best leading actress nominations at the 1996 Golden Horse Awards in Taipei and the 1997 Hong Kong Film Awards – and the industry finally began to take her seriously.
Ng again received best actress nominations from both for her dramatic role in the crime drama Portland Street Blues (1998), and won the prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
“I always ask the director to consider me a newcomer,” Ng said of her approach in an interview with the Post in 2010. “Some directors might be worried about pointing out problems in people’s work. When I’m on the set, I put my ego aside. I talk to the director about anything I’m not comfortable with before filming starts.”
Ng’s biggest break arguably came in 2002 when she played the title role in Samson Chiu Leung-chun’s Golden Chicken, a comedy drama depicting Hong Kong’s societal shifts between the 1970s and the 2000s through the eyes of an optimistic sex worker.
The film received five nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards, including best picture and best actress, and won in all three of the categories in which it was nominated at the Golden Horse Awards, including best actress for Ng.
The first sequel, Golden Chicken 2, arrived the next year, and was duly nominated in four categories at the Hong Kong Film Awards, again including best actress for Ng.
In 2006, Ng gave birth to their daughter, Jilian. To this day, the couple remain happily unmarried and often make public appearances together at awards ceremonies and media events. Ng is said to have rejected Chan’s marriage proposal as she did not deem marriage a necessary commitment.
“I am not an appendage to anyone and I certainly do not need to deliver a baby in exchange for marriage,” Ng told the Post in 2009. “Besides, in this industry, it is so cool if you are remembered as an individual.
“I am not Mrs Chan; I don’t care about the title. And I am very comfortable with our relationship now.”
The Golden Chicken franchise was brought back a third time in 2014 with Golden Chickensss – directed by Matt Chow Hoi-kwong, who had co-hosted a show with Ng at Commercial Radio Hong Kong in the mid-2000s. Ng, who also produced the film, was again nominated for best actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
Ng once told an interviewer that comedic acting “has never been an easy task”, since the genre is often neglected at major film awards. Even so, she not only made a name for herself as a comic actress, but has helped put comedy back on the map.
One of Ng’s most recent public appearances was for the premiere of her latest film, Love Lies, at the 2024 Hong Kong International Film Festival on March 29, where her partner Chan and their daughter accompanied her on the red carpet.
“I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family,” Ng told the Post’s Edmund Lee in a 2014 interview. “My father worked very hard to bring us up. I’ve always been fighting an uphill battle.
“Every time I fall into a hole and have to climb up again, I wipe my tears and keep working. I just do my best.
“So when people are having fun, I’m hitting the gym – in all honesty I could just give up because nobody has asked anything of me. When people are feasting, I’m eating vegetables. I find it worthwhile, even though I have to continue with my suffering.
“Every day I’m striving to maintain the value of Ng Kwan-yu for another year or three months – and this applies as much to my career as it does my family.”
