Ray Lui Leung Wai

Biography

Ray Lui Leung Wai is a Hong Kong actor and businessman of Vietnamese-Chinese descent, born on 22 December 1956 in Cholon, Saigon, Vietnam. His father was a Chinese immigrant who moved to Vietnam in the 1940s for business. Lui spent his early years in Saigon where he learned Cantonese by playing with neighbourhood children, and suffered a motorcycle accident that left a permanent scar on his face. In 1967, his family emigrated to Hong Kong due to the Vietnam War, with Lui, his mother and youngest brother arriving in 1968. He worked in his father's handbag factory in 1973 to help the family after his mother fell ill, and dropped out of secondary school. His father, an amateur actor, encouraged him to pursue acting, leading him to enrol in the sixth TVB artist training course in 1976, graduating in 1977. He rose to fame playing "Ding Lik" in the 1980 classic series "The Bund", his first leading role that made him a household name. He left TVB in 1990 to focus on films, with his most notable work being the 1991 gangster biopic "To Be Number One". He returned to television in 2008 with the series "Born Rich".