Tony Leung Chiu-wai Set To Receive Lifetime Achievement Award At The Venice Film Festival

Tony Leung Chiu-wai - Han Myung-Gu

Hong Kong actor and singer Tony Leung Chiu-wai will receive the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the 80th Venice Film Festival.  The festival will be held from August 30 to September 9, 2023, on the Lido in Venice, Italy.

Leung’s decades-long career includes Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and the recent Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The Golden Lion is nothing new to Leung, having starred in three films that have won the top prize Golden Lion at Venice: A City of Sadness (1989); Cyclo (1995); and Lust, Caution (2007).

According to Festival Director Alberto Barbera, Leung is a dynamic performer whose international career has grown in tandem with the expansion of global film distribution. Barbera added that "Tony Leung's roles spanned a large diversity of genres, but also bridged television, popular culture, and art-cinema at different latitudes.” Leung is widely recognized as one of the most prominent performers of his time, with a pan-Asian and global profile that has grown in tandem with evolving screen cultures.

Leung has received numerous honors over his career, which began in the 1980s. Leung won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in In the Mood for Love. He is also a seven-time Hong Kong Film Awards winner and a three-time Golden Horse Film Awards winner, holding the record for the most awards in the Best Actor category.