Childhood & Early Life
Wallace Chung was born in Hong Kong, on 30th November 1974 to a middle class Chinese business family. While his family business was good during Wallace’s early years, he was a dreamer and dreamed of becoming an actor by all his heart. That dream continued to be with him all through his childhood and early teenage years.
Pretty good in the academics as well, he was a sincere student during his school days, and participated in extracurricular activities, such as sports and theatrical plays. During all this time, the dreams of becoming an actor were getting all the more intense.
When he was 16, the entire business set-up on which the family survived came crumbling down and the family became financially insecure. Wallace had to stop his studies and support the family. He started doing odd jobs along with his father to make the ends meet. He has confessed that he had to work as a newspaper deliveryman during his bad days, and he continued on this path until the age of 19, till the business got a lot better.
But that wasn’t enough, and Wallace was sure that he didn’t want to be a burden on his family by continuing with higher education, which was more often than not, quite costly. He then chose to live the dream he had had since his very childhood, of becoming a TV star. He enrolled himself into the dance classes at TVB at the age of 19. Wallace later said that his love for dancing got him to TVB and not any bad financial conditions.
The sheer hard work and dedication got him far enough to the final six in the competition held by TVB and they started further nurturing him to have a successful career in the entertainment field. Just then he started auditioning and with solid mentorship, it wasn’t very hard for him to bag some meaty roles in the early phases of his career.
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Career
Making his acting debut with ‘The Chord to Victory’ in 1993, he quickly got recognized as a talented actor, a few more acting roles followed and he started getting enough attention in the neighbouring country Taiwan as well.
Record company BMG pursued Wallace to release a music album in Taiwan and in July 1995, Wallace adhered to their wishes and released his debut album ‘OREA’, which brought him unexpected success. The album topped the charts for many weeks that followed and Wallace got busy with recording his second album immediately.
The second music album titled ‘By Your Side’ was released in December and followed the success of the first one, eventually making Wallace a major celebrity in Taiwan. He started getting known as ‘Little Sun’, and Wallace didn’t disappoint his Taiwanese fans either and started releasing back to back albums while at the same time, he kept appearing in Hong Kong films and TV series.
In 1997, Wallace returned to Hong Kong to work on the movie ‘Sweet Symphony’, which was his first movie back home since gaining popularity in Taiwan. His acting career flourished quickly, with roles in some successful films such as ‘Love Tragedy’ and ‘Fight or Die’. The former one became a success with the film awards, and Wallace received humongous appreciation for his role in the film.
For the following few years, Wallace kept hopping between Taiwan and Hong Kong to take care of his music career, along with the acting. During this time, he became part of some widely famous dramas such as ‘Windstorm’, ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘Forever Young’. In 2005, he successfully furthered his film career with films ‘The Patriotic Knights’ and ‘The Midnight Sun’, both the films were huge commercial and critical successes.
In a major career step, Wallace set up his very own recording studio in the year 2006 and released his EP ‘Feng He Re Li’. Some meaty roles kept raining in one him and he kept mesmerizing his national and international fans with appearances in hit films and TV series’ such as ‘Rose Martial World’, ‘Night Rose’ and ‘Dual for Love’.
In the most successful acting stint of his career, he played the leading role in ‘Undercover’, which was a war suspense series. Upon its release, the series received some overwhelming reviews from even the most hard core critics. His drama ‘Too late to Say loving you’, also helped him in gaining further fans across the national borders. His role in the series eventually became the most widely popular role that Wallace became known for.
The dreamy success story continued with 2011’s ‘Imminent Crisis’, a series where he played the double role as twins. The drama garnered high ratings and earned Wallace the Audience’s Favourite Actor Award at the Golden Rooster Awards and many other honours in Taiwan.
His two subsequent projects ‘My Sunshine’ and ‘Meet Miss Anxiety’ put him in the favourite foreign actor list of South Korean audiences and the close ties both the industries share with each other made sure that Wallace was soon to appear in a collaborative project.
Around 2015, the wave of Chinese-Korean co-productions was going very strong and ‘Bounty Hunters’ was one of the results of co-production. The film was at that time, one of the costliest films coming from either China or South Korea and the gamble paid off well. The film became one of the highest earners of the year, with Wallace furthering his growing reputation outside Chinese borders as well.
In July 2016, Wallace saw a major change in image in the film ‘Three’ and played an antagonist, for which he received a widespread critical acclaim. At the highly prestigious Shanghai Film Festival, he won the award for Most Anticipated Actor.
By this time, Wallace has released 12 music albums and has also appeared in many variety shows. ‘Xuan Zhuan Ren Ma’ is his biography he wrote and published in the year 2006.
Personal Life
Wallace Chung hates technology and says that although it is necessary to keep one, he isn’t very fond of using his smart phone. He prefers reading in his free time over using social media apps, which he considers a waste of time.
Although he has yet to come out in the open about it, he is said to be the husband of a stylist Rita Tse and is also rumoured to have a daughter. Wallace has deliberately kept his personal life a secret from media and his fans.
