Peter Chen Ho 陳厚
Peter Chen Ho came into Hong Kong cinema from the trading business. At the MP&GI studio he became known for Mambo Girl with Grace Chang, and at Shaw Brothers he became one of the regular leads in urban musicals. His co-stars were Linda Lin Dai and Betty Loh Tih, whom he married in 1962. Chen's film career lasted about a decade and a half and was cut short when he fell gravely ill.
Before he became Peter Chen Ho, Chen Shulun attended St. Francis Xavier's School in Shanghai. In 1950 he came to Hong Kong with his family and took a job at a trading firm. Three years later he auditioned at Shaw and Sons but did not sign a contract. Director Tu Kuang-Chi, who took part in the selection, recommended him to Xinhua. That is how Chen ended up on the set of Qiu Jin, the Revolutionary Heroine (1953). For several more years he played small roles, including in Camille (1955) and Songs of the Peach Blossom River (1956). In 1957 he was given his first leading role in Holiday Express.
That same year Chen moved to MP&GI. The company made films about contemporary urban life and distributed them itself in Singapore, Malaya and other countries in the region. Mambo Girl (1957) turned out to be one of its most notable musical pictures. Grace Chang sings and dances there, and Chen appears beside her in the company of young city dwellers who dress and amuse themselves according to the latest Hong Kong fashion. At the time the studio was just acquiring its own stars and was making primarily urban films in Mandarin. After Mambo Girl, Chen was already recognized, and the Hong Kong Film Archive names him one of the actors who became the face of MP&GI at that time.
At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s he moved to Shaw Brothers. In Les Belles (1961) Chen appeared with Linda Lin Dai. He later worked with the Japanese director Inoue Umetsugu, who made musical pictures about contemporary life for the studio. Among them are Hong Kong Nocturne (1967) and Hong Kong Rhapsody (1968). In the musical numbers Chen had to hold his own confidently alongside the singers and dancers on whom the whole film often rested. The studio's archive ranks Chen among its leading musical actors. He managed to work in this genre both at MP&GI and at Shaw, where Japanese directors were now increasingly invited to shoot urban pictures. He also had roles without musical numbers. In The Rose of Summer (1961) his partner was Betty Loh Tih, also known as Lo Ti.
In 1962 they married. For Chen it was his second marriage. They had a daughter, and in 1967 the couple divorced. The newspapers discussed Chen's possible infidelity. If a later retelling of an interview is to be believed, Loh disputed this version and said she had long pondered the decision to part. When she died in December 1968, Chen had to answer questions about the suicide version put forward by the newspapers. He said he did not believe Loh could have willingly left her daughter, and promised to look after the girl.
By the end of the decade Chen was already seriously ill. During the shooting of Love Song Over the Sea (1970) he fell ill. The production had been started by the Japanese director Koji Shima. In the course of shooting both the lead actor and the director were replaced. The film was released in 1970 with Chin Feng in the lead role, and Kuei Chih-Hung was credited as director. Chen never acted again. He went to the United States for treatment, where he died of intestinal cancer in 1970. The Hong Kong Film Archive states that he was born in 1929, while the Hong Kong Memory reference gives 1931. He was about forty years old.
