Ng Man-Tat spent a decade standing next to Stephen Chow, playing the uncle, the fixer, the disgraced old pro, and he was never filler. He made nonsense comedy believable by refusing to play it as nonsense.
Fi1m perspective
In Shaolin Soccer (2001) a rubbish collector kicks an empty can hard enough to worry a man who used to be called Golden Leg, and Ng Man-Tat plays the worry, not the gag. Fung's leg was broken over a bribe years ago; what he has left is an eye for talent, and he proposes a team as if it were the last sensible thing he will ever do. Chow does the kung fu. Ng does the standing still, the watching, the slow decision to hope again, and the film is kinder for it. That was his job for more than ten years, and he did it without fuss.
He came up through television, in wuxia parts in the late 1970s, and did not work with Chow until the TVB series The Final Combat in 1989. All for the Winner (1990) followed, and with it the name Uncle Tat and the shape of the partnership: Chow talks nonsense at speed, Ng stands beside him as the uncle, the teacher or the crook who has seen it all before and is somehow still surprised. Fight Back to School (1991), the two parts of A Chinese Odyssey (1995), King of Comedy (1999): through the 1990s he was in most of Chow's hits, and Shaolin Soccer was the last of them. After 2001 he worked on in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland, and was still being hired for large productions as late as The Wandering Earth (2019).
The comedy worked because he did not treat it as comedy. He memorised whole scripts, other people's lines included, and said, "I act every role as if I'm the lead", and the result is a sidekick who always seems to have a life going on just outside the frame. The same habit served him in straighter parts. In God of Gamblers (1989) he is a loan shark; in A Moment of Romance (1990), alongside Andy Lau, he plays Rambo, a former triad man, and the part shows what he could do when nobody was asking him to be funny.
The cost was the obvious one. He was almost never given a lead, and his name is so tied to Chow's that it is hard to describe him without it, which he is said to have minded as the partnership went on. We would not pretend Shaolin Soccer is a great film; we liked it with reservations and said so. But watching Fung, with a broken leg and a ruined name and not one scene in which to feel sorry for himself, we felt sorry for him, and that is Ng's doing rather than the script's. Start with Shaolin Soccer, then go back to All for the Winner and see how early the whole arrangement was already in place.
Biography
Richard Ng Man-tat (also credited as Wu Meng-da or Richard Ng) was a Hong Kong actor. He was born on 2 January 1952 in Xiamen, Fujian, China, and died on 27 February 2021 in Hong Kong.
He trained at TVB's acting classes in the early 1970s and appeared in numerous Hong Kong films and television series from the 1970s onwards. Ng was best known for his frequent collaborations with Stephen Chow in mo lei tau comedies, including All for the Winner (1990), The God of Cookery (1996), King of Comedy (1999) and Shaolin Soccer (2001), in which he played Fung. He also appeared in A Chinese Odyssey Part One: Pandora's Box (1995) and A Chinese Odyssey Part Two: Cinderella (1995). He won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for A Moment of Romance (1990).
Ng was often known by the nickname 'Uncle Tat'.
