Ni Kuang, one of Hong Kong’s most distinguished screenwriters and novelists, has died. He was 87.
On Sunday, he died in Hong Kong. Local media reported that he had skin cancer.
Ni wrote more than 300 screenplays. Many were in martial arts and others were for Shaw Brothers Studios with Chang Chen. He also wrote scripts for classic movies “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin”And “One Armed Swordsman”And had a hand in two of Bruce Lee’s six movies “The Big Boss” and “Fist of Fury”Although the writing credit was to Wei Lo.
Ni was a novelist and wrote The “New Adventures of Wesley”A series of detective stories featuring extra-terrestrial and alien creatures. These stories were originally published in the Ming Pao newspaper starting in 1960s. ‘Wisely’).
“For those who are a bit old, they all know that the three greatest talents in the literary world are Jin Yong, (popularly known as Louis Cha), Gu Long and Ni Kuang. After that, no such iconic and epoch-making people have appeared,”Tenky Tin, spokesperson for the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, said in quotes to the South China Morning Post “I am wondering if this is the end of an era.”Gu died in 1985. Cha passed away in 2018 after a more recent death.
Ni’s own back story is equally colorful. His birth date was 1935 in the then Republic of China. However, reports vary as to whether he was in Shanghai or Ningbo. He was a young man in early Communist China who worked as a security officer in Inner Mongolia, writing death sentences. He gave in to the authority and fled to Hong Kong, 1957.
He became a successful novelist immediately after that and a screenwriter in the 1960s.
He was a staunch anti-Communist throughout his entire life, and he never set foot on mainland China again. He believed individual freedom and freedom to express oneself were essential. “After departing the mainland, I am free without any restrictions and able to talk and think freely,”He told a 2019 interviewer.
Ni departed Hong Kong in 1992, ahead of the territory’s 1997 handover from British rule to Chinese, and moved to the U.S. His wife couldn’t adapt to the American lifestyle so he returned to Hong Kong. He was skeptical about the way the city was controlled. “The Communist Party decides everything. There is no such a thing as one country, two systems,” a reference to the promise made to maintain Hong Kong’s way of life until 2047.
Ni received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hong Kong Film Awards 2012 in Ni. He won the Jubilee Honor Award from the Hong Kong Screenwriters’ Guild in 2018.