Andy Lau

Andrew Lau Tak-wah (; born 27 September 1961) is a Hong Kong actor, singer-songwriter and film producer. He has been one of Hong Kong's most commercially successful film actors since the mid-1980s, performing in more than 160 films while maintaining a successful singing career at the same time. In the 1990s, Lau was branded by the media as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop and was named as "Fourth Tiger" among the Five Tiger Generals of TVB during the 1980s. By April 2000, Lau won an unprecedented total of 292 awards. He also holds numerous film acting awards, having won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor three times and the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actor twice. In 2005, Lau received the "No.1 Box office Actor 1985–2005" award of Hong Kong, yielding a box office total of HK$1,733,275,816 for shooting 108 films in the past 20 years, In 2018, Lau was invited to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Early life Andy Lau was born in Tai Po, Hong Kong, as the son of a fireman named Lau Lai. He was the fourth child in the family, with three elder sisters, one younger sister, and a younger brother named Lau Tak-sing. Although his family was considered wealthy due to his grandfather being a landowner, his father moved them to the slums of Diamond Hill when he was six years old. The area was full of wooden houses, which unfortunately burnt down when he was eleven. During his childhood, Lau had to fetch water for his family up to eight times a day as their house lacked plumbing. He graduated from a Band One secondary school, Ho Lap College in San Po Kong, Kowloon. He was named as Lau Fook-wing during his academic years. He also practices Chinese calligraphy. Lau converted to Buddhism in the 1980s. He was raised in a nominally Buddhist household and is now a follower of the Lingyan Mountain Temple in Taiwan. Career