Kay Tse On-Kei 謝安琪
Kay Tse's best-known song, "Wedding Invitation Street," arrived in the wake of the public debate over the fate of the Royal Pier. Its title refers to Li Tung Street in Wan Chai, known for the workshops where wedding invitations were printed. The song became one of the biggest Cantopop hits of the late 2000s. Her first film roles came at the same time as her first solo concerts at the Hong Kong Coliseum. In Lover's Discourse she played a shy laundrette worker in love with a customer. And she earned her first Hong Kong Film Award nomination for Best Actress for Band Four, in which her character ends up in a rock band with her father, her half-sister and her adopted son.
Kay Tse was born on 13 March 1977 in Hong Kong and was an only child. She grew up in the Wang Fuk residential estate in Tai Po. Music was always playing at home — her father loved Japanese songs, her mother and aunt preferred Western ones, and her aunt and uncle had played in a band in their youth. From the age of six Kay took piano lessons, and she also studied the violin a little. During her school years she injured the fingers of her left hand setting off fireworks. By her own account, after the injury she could no longer manage difficult passages. She earned a Grade 8 piano qualification. After school Kay studied translation and linguistics at the Open University of Hong Kong, and then American studies at the University of Hong Kong. She made a living giving English and music lessons.
At a student competition Kay sang "I Believe" (相信) from Stephanie Sun's repertoire, accompanying herself on the piano. In an interview with Sina she recalled that one of the judges, songwriter Adrian Chow, arrived late and missed her performance. A fellow judge told him about Kay and recommended her. Chow was then working as a lawyer at a music company and arranged an audition for her. According to Kay, the company was interested in working with her, but she decided to record with Chow. Her debut album Kay One was put together by the independent label Ban Ban Music and released by Avex Asia in 2005. In her debut song "姿色份子" Kay sang about the way women are pushed toward one and the same beauty ideal. Then came "愁人節", a song about how people with nowhere to live spend Valentine's Day. In the early days she picked out her own costumes, did her own makeup, and took the bus to performances at shopping malls. Over the first year, by her own account, all her savings were gone.
At the end of 2006, shortly after moving to the Cinepoly label, Kay held a press conference and announced that she was expecting a child. By then she was already engaged to singer Louis Cheung. They married in January 2007, and their son James was born that summer. The tabloid press and the internet criticized her for getting pregnant before the wedding, reminding her of her Christian faith. Kay had gone to church with her mother since childhood. In an interview with The Sun she recalled that she was taken aback at first, but her family and fellow parishioners stood by her. She apologized to the label's staff for the fact that they had to change their plans. The company gave her time to rest and helped her arrange recording sessions and return to performing.
In 2008 came the album Binary with "Wedding Invitation Street" (囍帖街). That was the Hong Kong name for Lee Tung Street, where wedding cards had been printed for decades. Kay told the Ming Pao newspaper that after the public debate over the Royal Pier she herself called lyricist Wyman Wong and suggested he write a song about what the city loses to redevelopment. The result was a ballad about a breakup, in which it was easy to hear a love story, especially if you had never been to Lee Tung. The song took the top awards of four Hong Kong broadcasters. That autumn Kay underwent surgery for another collapsed lung — the first time this had happened to her was before her career even began. In May 2009 she gave her first solo shows at the Hong Kong Coliseum. On the first night Kay invited Adrian Chow on stage and recalled how they had recorded her first album in their spare time.
At one of those concerts Kay sang a duet with Eason Chan. After the performance the Hong Kong tabloids picked up a rumour of a romance between them. Both denied it, and Louis Cheung publicly spoke up in his wife's defence. In December 2010, when Kay and Eason were promoting Lover's Discourse, she again had to answer questions about their relationship. She told the Yangcheng Evening News that because of the story she had been unable to work properly for about six months. Eason, she said, advised her not to take newspaper items so much to heart, his wife stood up for her, and in the end the two families, who had barely known each other before, became friends. Kay added separately that scenes shared with Eason had never been in the script to begin with.
In the thriller Nightfall (2012), Kay played a police officer subordinate to Simon Yam's character. The fight scene with Nick Cheung was especially hard for her. At a press meeting she said that Cheung stayed in character even between takes and that at first she was afraid to speak to him. In the fight itself she tried to put up a real resistance – she wanted her character to behave like an experienced police officer. According to her, in several takes her co-star gripped her throat too hard. A year later Teddy Robin invited her to join Doomsday Party (2013). She played a bank employee taken hostage, and together with several other actors recorded the song that plays over the finale. In the TVB series Blue Veins, which went into production in 2015 and aired in the spring of 2016, she had the female lead. Her character, the forensic pathologist Lam Mun-Nam, hides the fact that she is a vampire. Kay's co-star was Kevin Cheng.
By that time Kay had recorded the Mandarin album Second Home (2010) and worked with Adrian Chow again on the Cantonese album Kontinue (2014). Chow's song "Egg and Lamb" (雞蛋與羔羊) was read in Hong Kong as a statement about freedom and submission. Chow later said that because of this record the whole team came under pressure. In the spring of 2016 Kay announced on stage that she was taking a break, and in March 2017 she and Louis had a daughter, Karina. In 2018 Kay returned to music with Juno Mak, with whom she had recorded the duet "Rashomon" (羅生門) before the break. For The Album Part One, Mak devised the story of two people who got together in their youth. Over the years both the characters and their relationship change, and the listener learns what happens to them from the songs, photographs and scenes printed in the booklet. Kay sang as Po Ming-Sin. The final album of the trilogy came out in 2020. When her contract with Mak's company ended, Kay founded her own label.
Kay met Teddy Robin again on the set of Band Four. In Doomsday Party they had no scenes together, but now they played a daughter and a father who walked out on the family many years earlier. Her Kat sings in a rock band, raises an adopted son, a gifted drummer, and is gradually losing her memory. Kay and Teddy rehearsed a great deal, trying to work out what a father and daughter might say to each other after so many years. Kay also took part in working on the songs. In the autumn before the film's release, the actors played together on a street in Causeway Bay. Kay said she had performed on the street back in her student days, and that after her debut the label advised her to stick to shows in shopping malls. In 2024 the role of Kat earned her a Hong Kong Film Award nomination for Best Actress, and the song she performed, "Don't Forget" (毋忘), was among the contenders for Best Original Film Song.
In the action comedy Out of the Shadow, first shown at the Osaka Asian Film Festival, she played a former undercover police officer. She lives quietly in the fishing village of Tai O until her daughter starts taking matters into her own hands there. In the Hong Kong animated film Another World, Kay voiced a celestial maiden who guides a spirit conductor. In the short-film version she voiced the conductor himself, while in the feature-length version the role went to Said Chung. Kay said that her character speaks with almost no change of intonation, and sometimes the person she is addressing hears her voice inside their head – a rare case in voice acting when the speech doesn't have to be matched to lip movements. After the Wang Fuk fire in November 2025, Kay spoke about classmates and neighbours who died. Together with Louis, she donated one million Hong Kong dollars to help the victims. In December, Kay opened her Tidal tour in Malaysia, marking the twentieth anniversary of her music debut.
