Tony Liu Tian-jue

Tony Liu Tian-jue, credited through most of his career under the Cantonese stage name Lau Wing, has a claim almost nobody else can make: he appears in all four of the films Bruce Lee completed as a leading man. The Big Boss in 1971, Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon in 1972, and Enter the Dragon in 1973, that last one uncredited as a tournament fighter. He was a young contract player watching the biggest thing in the history of the industry happen from inside the frame.

The bulk of the career is Shaw Brothers, where he became a leading man through the late 1970s and 1980s and where the studio used his straight-backed, faintly aloof bearing for emperors and swordsmen. He played the Qianlong emperor in four of the films listed here alone. He was Gu Long's detective Lu Xiaofeng twice, in Clan of Amazons and The Duel of the Century. He was Ximen Qing in Tiger Killer, and one of the two feuding noblemen in Human Lanterns, still among the nastiest films the studio ever put out. The Bastard Swordsman pictures are the wire-work end of the same run.

He kept working after the studio system collapsed, and the later credits are a different sort of interesting: Master Tsang in Visible Secret, To Hok-Seun in Revenge: A Love Story, a bar owner in Little Q, a part in Sons of the Neon Night in 2025. He turns up as himself in documentaries about the man whose films he started in, including Be Water. Television, by the record, gave him Qin Shi Huang and Genghis Khan, and those series are not among the credits listed here.