Bernice Liu Bik-Yi 廖碧兒
Bernice Liu won a beauty pageant and came from Canada to Hong Kong television, where at first she learned Cantonese right on set. Viewers knew her from TVB family comedies and the action film Bad Blood. After an on-set injury, she returned to filming. By that time Liu was already involved in winemaking, and later she lectured on the wine business at the University of Hong Kong.
Bernice Liu was born in 1979 and grew up in Prince Rupert, on Canada's Pacific coast. She enrolled at a university in British Columbia, but in 2001, after winning Miss Chinese International, she stayed on to work in Hong Kong. The first thing she had to do was learn Cantonese. At TVB she memorized her lines in a language she barely spoke, and on camera she tried to keep pace with her co-stars. Liu's first big role came in Virtues of Harmony, a period family comedy. When part of the cast moved over to the modern-day sequel Virtues of Harmony 2, Liu stayed with the series. By then she had already found her feet in comedy, where a joke sometimes hinges on a single intonation or on knowing when to let your partner get a word in.
At TVB she played young professionals in Survivor's Law and Healing Hands 3. In Love Bond her co-star was Moses Chan, and viewers began following them as if waiting for the story to continue off screen. A few years later the press speculated that Liu had left Chan for businessman Alastair Lam. In 2012 Liu denied having had an affair with Lam. Lam himself later said on air that they had dated for about a year and discussed marriage. In public, each of them stuck to their own version.
In Hong Kong cinema Liu initially appeared in comedies like My Wife Is 18. In Bad Blood she was cast as the taciturn Dumbo, who can hold her own in a world of gangsters. She had never had a role like that on television. Here the fights could say more about the character than her lines did, and Liu had to shift her gaze or change her movement at just the right moment while several other people around her were still performing their own stunts. She also appeared in The Legend Is Born - Ip Man and in the series The King of Fighters. While filming the family series Show Me the Happy, Liu fell into a pit and injured her back. By her account, she finished the shoot on painkillers, and after surgery it took her several months to learn to walk again. Once back on set, she turned to stunt doubles more often in places where she might previously have tried a stunt herself.
Even before the injury, Liu had taken up something her early roles would hardly have suggested. In 2008 she began producing wine in the Napa Valley under the Bellavizio label. On set she had had to learn from the start from co-stars who understood Hong Kong television better than she did. Now she again found herself among people who had known each other for years and could judge the work she was only just getting to grips with from a few details. In time Liu acquired a vineyard in France. In 2017 she said that between shoots she traveled to the Bordeaux region, and that with friends she had opened a bar in Hong Kong with a kitchen where food was smoked. Later she went back to studying and tried to combine a business course in Canada with work in Asia.
In 2017 Liu still named acting as her main profession. She had worked in several languages, including in Singapore, where in the series Lion Moms (狮城辣妈) she played Jennifer. Liu remembered a scene with her on-screen daughter that was shot from early morning until almost two in the morning. By her account, after the last take the people on set simply hugged each other. In Hong Kong she also appeared in Margaret & David - Green Bean and The Attorney. Now shoots had to be fitted around trips for her wine business.
In 2024 Liu described herself as a traveling winemaker and said she still wanted to learn from producers in different regions. She shared her experience in Hong Kong as well. In 2025, for the second year running, she was giving students at a local university lectures on wine and investment. She gave them in English, the language in which, a quarter of a century earlier, she had joined a Cantonese television troupe.
