In life, sometimes when one door closes, another opens for you.
For veteran Hong Kong actor Sean Lau, losing the opportunity to study abroad in his youth changed the course of his life.
The 60-year-old was a guest on Hong Kong actress-host Carol Cheng’s YouTube talk show The Do Show, where she asked him how he lost the chance to study in Canada.
“I had lung disease. During my physical examination, I was found to have tuberculosis. I was unable to leave Hong Kong and received treatment for six months,” Sean revealed in an episode released on Dec 12.
He added that he didn’t know how he contracted the disease and no one in his family got it.
“Many years later, I spoke to a doctor. It turned out that this disease was very common back then. I was told that I was very lucky, because (contracting tuberculosis) would have been fatal in the earlier days,” he said.
When Carol, 67, said that a movie character who contracted tuberculosis often had a tragic ending, Sean completed her sentence by adding: “They would usually vomit blood.”
He continued that it wasn’t the case for him, as he didn’t have any symptoms and is fine now.
“I was around 15 or 16 years old then… In fact, after I was diagnosed, I didn’t think I had a lung disease. I played football after school until I was exhausted. I didn’t feel out of breath or cough, let alone vomit blood,” Sean shared.
As he lost his opportunity to go for higher education in Canada, Sean went to work as a messenger after graduating from school.
Although he had never thought of becoming an actor, fate seemed to have guided him to it.
His father saw a TVB advertisement on their acting classes and asked him to go for it.
People at his workplace also encouraged him to sign up for it because of his tall build.
Then, a postman he had met through work said the same to him, adding that Chow Yun Fat was also a postman before.
By then, he had already picked up the enrolment form and submitted it to TVB.
Sean told Carol: “I realised once you are about to get into something, sometimes it’s not up to you to decide, the matter will push you forward into it.”
He participated in TVB’s acting classes in 1983, when he was 17, and made his showbiz debut in 1984 in the drama Draw Out the Rainbow.
He began acting in films in 1986 and was famous for his performances in movies such as C’est la vie, mon cheri (1993) and a number of action films including Full Alert (1997), Running out of Time (1999) and Mad Detective (2007).
He has bagged multiple Best Actor awards, most recently at the 41st Hong Kong Film Awards in 2023 for Detective vs Sleuths.
His latest movie Papa was just released in Hong Kong.
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