Lai Man-Wai
Chinese actor and director (1893–1953)
Lai Man-wai (Chinese: 黎民偉; pinyin: Li Minwei; September 25, 1893 – October 26, 1953), also romanised as Lay Min-wei or M.W. Ray, considered the "Father of Hong Kong Cinema", was the director of the first Hong Kong film Zhuangzi Tests His Wife in 1913. In the film, Lai played the role of the wife, partly due to the reluctance of women to participate in show business at the time.
Born in Yokohama, Japan, of Xinhui, Guangdong origin and raised in Hong Kong, he joined Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang party in 1911 and helped make anti-warlord movies.
Biography
Lai was born in 1893 in Yokohama, Japan to Chinese parents. He grew up in Hong Kong. Liu's earliest exposure to cinema was watching a newsreel from the Russo-Japanese War.
In 1913, Lai founded a drama troupe in Hong Kong. He collaborated with Ukrainian-American filmmaker Benjamin Brodsky in the production of two short fiction films.
Lai was a member of Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Alliance.
In 1921, Lai founded a film exhibition company.
“Lai Man-Wai” enters the record as chinese actor and director (1893–1953). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Man-Wai, Chinese and actor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Lai Man-Wai” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Man-Wai, Chinese and actor provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q360583. VIAF identifies the subject as 107365639. The Library of Congress control number is nb2010004026. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1953, 1913 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lai Man-Wai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.