Cutie Mui Siu-Wai 梅小惠
Cutie Mui could make audiences laugh with her booming live on-air laugh and with a spot-on impersonation of someone the whole public knows by sight. In Show Time Blues she copied Sammi Cheng's mannerisms so diligently that the singer eventually coached her on how to nail the resemblance. In the family sitcom Virtues of Harmony, viewers fell for her character Shek Mei, one of the protagonist's two wives. After leaving TVB, Mui moved into advertising, and years later she put together her own team to make entertainment shows for the same audience she had once performed for every evening.
Cutie Mui was born on 17 April 1966 in Hong Kong and grew up in Mong Kok. Her father had two wives and seven children, and they all lived together. Cutie was the youngest daughter of the first wife and the second-to-last of all the children. The family lived modestly. Her father sold goods on the street by a cinema and built a spinning wheel for a game in which passers-by placed small coins. Mui recalled that this wheel helped feed the whole family and in time passed to one of her sisters as part of her dowry. The older children often looked after the younger ones, and their father, so that the girls would learn to write, asked them to send him letters. Cutie usually asked him to buy her something tasty or take her to the Lai Yuen amusement park, where her father loved to listen to the singers. Later it was her older sister Mui Siu-Ching, who worked as a television producer, who helped her find her feet in television.
After school, Mui studied English and took aerobics classes. In 1985 she tried her hand at a sports beauty pageant. She won no prize, but soon afterwards she began appearing on ATV, where her sister worked. On the set of Mun Tong Gung (1986), Mui met the actor Chang Wai-Kuen. It was her first love. They were together for thirteen years and then parted. Many years later, after his death, Mui said she remembered how he had supported her when she was very young and just starting out as an actress.
Moving to TVB after her sister, Cutie enrolled in acting classes and again began with roles as waitresses, schoolgirls and cashiers. Around that time she was once woken by her pager. It was about five in the morning, and an assistant director was looking for someone to replace an actress who had fallen ill on the set of Fate Cast of the Wind (1988). That day they were filming the wedding of Lawrence Ng's character, the extras had already been called, and Mui went straight to the studio to play the bride. Later the series producer Catherina Tsang offered her a more noticeable role in The Vixen's Tale (1989), where Mui played the cousin of Roger Kwok's character. That same year she appeared with Stephen Chow in The Final Combat and The Justice Of Life. Mui recalled that Chow taught her to pick up a joke quickly. That skill soon proved useful to her beyond series as well.
In the early 1990s, Ng Yu invited Mui to join the entertainment programme Enjoy Yourself Tonight (歡樂今宵). She agreed at once, even though the show went out live on weekdays and combining it with other shoots was difficult. Mui had watched it since childhood with her parents. Her father had even twice demonstrated martial arts techniques on the programme and was especially delighted to learn that his daughter would now be working there regularly. On this show audiences first properly heard her famous laugh, which was compared to a horse's neighing. In films, Cutie in those same years more often appeared in small roles. She played a neighbour in Skinny Tiger and Fatty Dragon (1990) and worked again with Stephen Chow in the comedies Look Out, Officer! (1990) and Fist of Fury 1991 II (1992).
Mui's character in Show Time Blues (1997) was called Yammi, and she was modelled on Sammi Cheng. Cutie learned to imitate the singer from the film Feel 100%. At first she barely looked at the screen, listening instead to how Cheng shaped her phrases and where she paused. Then she asked the singer to lend her some concert outfits. Cheng agreed, and one day caught Cutie on the floor by the dressing-room door during the filming of a scene with Alvina Kong. Cheng asked with a laugh why Mui was making her crawl, and then showed her herself how she would hold her hands and what she would say in such a situation. To achieve the resemblance, Cutie also plucked the ends of her eyebrows for three months. Later she joked that ever since she has had to draw them in with a pencil.
Virtues of Harmony began in 2001 as a period family comedy. Mui played Shek Mei, one of the two wives of Michael Tse's character. She constantly had to share her husband's attention with the second wife, played by Bonnie Chiu. Shooting was fast, but the elaborate makeup and hairstyles took time. According to Mui, she had to be at the TV City by half past five in the morning. Once she had to go straight from the set to the hospital to see her father. When he was taken in for surgery, Mui stood right there in the corridor pulling the pins out of her hair and dismantling her period hairstyle, assuming she would be back in the studio in the morning anyway. Her father died, and the next day she did indeed show up for filming. She recalled that an episode was often shot a week before it aired and the crew had almost no backlog of finished episodes.
In Virtues of Harmony 2 (2003), most of the characters kept their old names but found themselves in contemporary Hong Kong. Shek Mei became the childhood friend of Michael Tse's character, who now had a sweetheart of his own. Mui felt her character was being left with less and less room in the new version and asked to be written out of the series. For a while she still hosted entertainment shows and took small roles. On the big screen she could be seen in the comedy Short of Love (2009). At the end of that same year she hosted the charity telethon Tung Wah Charity Gala (歡樂滿東華). Mui later recalled it as her last appearance before a long break from television.
Mui got her first offer to work in advertising thanks to charity work. She was looking for sponsors for one of her events. One of the companies was impressed by how she ran it and offered her a job in promotion. At first she doubted she could get to grips with advertising. Then she learned to negotiate ad placements and to work with small firms that needed a way onto television. For a while she juggled both jobs. When coming up with lines on the fly became harder for her, she decided to focus on consultancy work. That experience came in handy at the start of the pandemic, when some production crews were left without work. Mui pitched myTV SUPER a talk show, Two Namesakes (雙祥見), hosted by Wayne Lai and Louis Yuen. The first of 36 episodes aired in August 2020. Mui handled the scripts, filming and editing, found venues and kept the accounts.
In the next show, Friendship Without Borders (友乜唔講得), Mui returned on camera. Together with Yuen and Alvina Kong, she invited people she had once made Hong Kong television with. Thirteen episodes were shot in 2022 and aired in 2025. Mui was expected to have as her first guest a star the audience would instantly recognize, but she insisted on inviting Ng Yu. She wanted to start with the man who had once brought her into Enjoy Yourself Tonight.
