Sihung Lung

Prolific actor brought out of retirement by Ang Lee

Hsiung Lang (Sihung Lung), actor: born 1930; married Pao Chia (one daughter); died Taipei 2 May 2002.

Though he acted in over 100 Chinese-language films, it was only after his official retirement that Sihung Lung found international fame when he was brought back to the cinema by the director Ang Lee, who gave him leading roles in such films as The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In The Wedding Banquet, as the father visiting New York to attend the wedding of his son, who is actually gay, and in Eat Drink Man Woman, as the father who gives a lavish dinner every Sunday for his three daughters, Lung displayed a taciturn authority that kept sentimentality at bay, though both films were perceptive, funny and extremely moving.

Born Hsiung Lang in 1930 in a village in mainland China, Lung served in the nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek as a teenager. After the Communist victory, he fled to Taiwan in 1949 and was in his twenties when he started acting with an army theatre group in Taipei. He acted in both Chinese and Western plays, including those of Shakespeare. "I learned to act in virtually any role during my army days," he said a few years ago, "and I became very proficient on the stage. It was an excellent learning experience, and I knew that acting was what I wanted to do."

Lung had a prolific film career, and in the 1970s he became a familiar face on Taiwanese television, appearing in scores of soap operas, often cast in tough guy roles. He was retired and nearly 60 years old when Ang Lee, the Taiwanese director who had settled in New York, remembered having seen him in productions as a child and asked him to play a leading role in Lee's first feature film, Tui Shou (Pushing Hands, 1991). The first of what some have labelled Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy (in which a parent with grown children has to confront a world of changing manners and morals), it told of an ageing martial arts master who moves to the home of his son and daughter-in-law in New York City.

The relationship between the old man, who speaks no English, and the daughter-in-law, who speaks no Chinese, is fraught with resentment and misunderstanding though both of them try to make the arrangement work. The film's title refers to the oriental t'ai chi exercise designed to help keep one's balance while unblancing one's opponent. Lung knew nothing of t'ai chi before filming, and he would rise at five each morning to take part in a t'ai chi class and thus be totally convincing on screen. Few people saw his efforts, for Pushing Hands achieved only a limited release, but Lung's performance in the film won him a Golden Horse, Taiwan's equivalent of the Oscar, as 1991's best actor – he had earlier won the award for best supporting actor in 1976.

The next collaboration of Lee and Lung, which also dealt with the clash between eastern and western cultures, was a critical and commercial success. In Hsi Yen (The Wedding Banquet, 1993) Lung and Ah-Leh Gua were the parents who travel from Taiwan to New York for their son's wedding, blissfully unaware that he is gay and marrying purely for their benefit (and to get his bride a green card). A beautifully observed combination of comedy and pathos, Lee's film is well served by Lung as the ailing father who does not make his sagacity too overt. The scene in which he lets his son's lover know that he is aware of the truth, filmed at the seashore with both men's backs to the camera, occasionally showing their profiles, is masterfully understated.

Both Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet featured scenes in which food figures prominently, and Lee was to combine his interest in food with his interest in communal life with Yin shi nan nu (Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), in which Lung was a widowed master chef who has lost his taste-buds but maintains a regular Sunday dinner for his three daughters despite growing cultural differences. Although the film also follows the personal lives of the three daughters, it is Lung's performance as the proud but warm-hearted father that gives the film its centre.

In Lee's phenomenonally popular Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), Lung had a change of pace, playing Sir Te, the wise court official in Beijing who receives the 400-year-old sword, the Green Destiny. While making the film, Lung was already in failing health.

Tom Vallance