Wu Tianming
Chinese film director and producer (1939-2014)
Wu Tianming (simplified Chinese: 吴天明; traditional Chinese: 吳天明; pinyin: Wú Tiānmíng; December 5, 1939 – March 4, 2014) was a Chinese film director and producer who was considered one of the leading "Fourth Generation" directors. He is best known for his film The King of Masks (1995).
Biography
Wu was born in Sanyuan County, Shaanxi Province, China on December 5, 1939. In 1960, aged twenty, he was accepted into a training class for film acting run by the Xi’an Film Studio. There were sixteen state-run studios in China at that time, and this was the closest to his home in Sanyuan, Shaanxi Province. He was put on the studio's payroll and had some bit-parts in the studio's productions of the early 1960s. In 1966, Mao's Cultural Revolution stopped productions in the studios. In 1974–1976, the last three years of the Cultural Revolution, Wu studied at the partly re-opened Beijing Film Academy, majoring in Film Directing.
In 1982, Wu co-directed two features at Xi’an with his friend Teng Wenji. Afterwards Wu made his debut as a solo director with River Without Buoys, whose commercial success led to Wu Tianming's appointment as head of the Xi'an Film Studio in 1983.
“Wu Tianming” enters the record as chinese film director and producer (1939-2014). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tianming, Chinese and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wu Tianming” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tianming, Chinese and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q529856. VIAF identifies the subject as 81608187. The Library of Congress control number is nr2003038506. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 2014, 1995 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wu Tianming” 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.