Kenneth Tsang
Biography
Kenneth Tsang Kong (5 October 1934 – 27 April 2022) was a Hong Kong actor. Tsang's career 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.
Tsang Koon-yat was born in Shanghai with family roots in Jida Zhuhai, Guangdong. Tsang attended high school at Wah Yan College, Hong Kong, and then at Wah Yan College, Kowloon. He attended McMurry College, Abilene, Texas for his freshman year and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a degree in architecture.
Tsang returned to Hong Kong in the early 1960s as an architect but was unsatisfied with the work. His younger sister by 2 years, Jeanette Lin (林翠), 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 (1955) when he was 16, which was followed by a role in Who Isn't Romantic? (1956). 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.
Tsang had a younger sister, Jeanette Lin Tsui [zh] (林翠), who was also a Hong Kong actress.
Tsang was married three times. His first wife was Chan Laidi (張萊娣), stage name Lan Di (藍娣), a Malaysian-Chinese and his co-star in The Big Circus and had 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. Chan died in 1991.
In 1980, Tsang married columnist and model Barbara Tang (邓拱璧) and had a daughter, Musette. Tsang and Tang divorced 10 years later in 1990.
In 1994 Tsang married Chiao Chiao (焦姣), a Chinese-born Taiwanese actress.
Tsang departed from Singapore and arrived in Hong Kong on 25 April 2022, where he began a seven-day Covid-19 quarantine at the Kowloon Hotel.
On the evening of 26 April, he experienced chest discomfort and asked his family to deliver his medication for chronic hypertension, which they promptly did.
However, the following day, he was found unresponsive in his room by health officials who arrived to conduct a PCR test, and paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.
