 Hong
Kong will probably never produce another star who will command the spotlight for
as long as Sun Ma Sze Tsang. From his teen years as the “child genius” of the Cantonese opera stage to the family scandals at his deathbed nearly seven
decades later, he was a constant presence in the city's celebrity landscape.
Born on June 20, 1916 in Shunde County, Guangdong, China, Tang Wing Cheung
was forced to survive on his wits from childhood. He started studying opera at age
nine and made his professional debut not long after. The talented teenager
attracted the attention the leading superstars of the day, including
Ma Shih-tseng, who was so impressed that he
bestowed upon Tang the stage name of "The New Ma
Shih-tseng" - Sun Ma Sze Tsang - popularly known as Sun Ma Chai.
In 1929 his father took him to French Indo-China, where he spent a year honing
his skills with a Chinese opera troupe in Saigon. Five years later, aged 18, he
joined the Shaw Brothers, performing in one of their theatres in Singapore.
He was a unique artist with a unique singing style, his overwhelming theatrical
success leading to the founding of his own Sun Ma Cantonese Opera Troupe. Stage
success was more than equaled before the motion picture cameras. He made his
debut at age 20 in A Perfect Marriage (1936) and starred in approximately 300
films, most of them comedies, before his screen farewell, Mr. Kwong Tung and the
Robber, in 1980. He was especially prolific in the 1950s and 1960s. In the last
five months of 1952, for instance, twenty Sun Ma features were released in Hong
Kong.
Sun Ma continued to appear on stage into the 1990s, and performed at so many
fundraising benefits that he was known as the Charity Opera King. He was awarded
an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1977 and the M.B.E. in 1978. He was
also extremely busy offstage. His first marriage resulted in divorce, the
second, to actress Leung Tim Tim, ended with her death from tuberculosis at age
29. He had three sons with third wife, actress Choi Chen Chu. While still
married, he began a 28-year relationship with Hung Kam Mui that produced four
children. They were formally wed in 1993.
Brother Cheung (the non-stage name by which he was familiarly referred to by
both industry insiders and the press) amassed a fortune estimated at over $1
billion. The inheritance became an issue that split the family, pitting Hung
against her children. The press couldn't get enough, and in Sun Ma's
illness-plagued final year more ink was expended on the goings-on of the Tang
family than the upcoming Handover. Sun Ma passed away on April 21, 1997, his
private life a public spectacle more dramatic than even the most farfetched
plots of his three hundred films.
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