Teddy Yip Wing Cho

Biography

Teddy Yip Wing Cho was a Hong Kong film industry veteran, born in 1945 in China into a family connected to cinema. His father Yip Yat-Fong was a renowned screenwriter who began his career in Shanghai in the late 1930s and moved to Hong Kong in 1956, working for major studios like Shaw Brothers. Teddy Yip moved to Hong Kong around 1963 after completing high school and entered the film world starting as a mechanical department worker and then as a camera assistant at Great Wall and Feng Huang studios. In the late 1960s he joined Shaw Brothers and worked as an assistant director under Law Wai. In 1970 he was promoted to director and helmed his first film "The Ghost Eunuch" released in 1971. When Tsao Wen-Huai founded Golden Harvest in 1971, Yip moved there and directed "The Invincible Sword". He collaborated with his father on several projects, with the father as screenwriter and son as director. In the late 1970s he traveled to Taiwan and Thailand to direct films. In 1982 he returned to Hong Kong to take an administrative position at Law Wai's film company. In the mid-1980s he joined D&B Films, co-founded by his friend Sammo Hung, where he managed studio operations. In 1990 he established his own company, Golden Leaf Film Company. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he appeared in around a hundred films in small supporting roles, often comedic characters such as miserly or petty figures and neighbors. In 2003 he contracted an acute inflammatory disease while shooting in Shanghai, and traveled between Hong Kong and Shanghai for treatment before passing away that same year.