Veteran Chinese actor Lu Qi, best known to film audiences as the strict opera master in Farewell My Concubine, has died in Beijing at the age of 101.
South Korean outlet TV Report, citing Taiwanese media, reported on November 3 that news of Lu’s death had been confirmed on November 1. Chinese news agency Xinhua also reported that the Beijing People’s Art Theatre actor died in Beijing on November 1 after an illness.
Lu played Master Guan, head of the Peking opera troupe who trains the young performers at the centre of Farewell My Concubine. He is remembered for his severe discipline of the boys who would become opera stars Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, played as adults by Leslie Cheung and Zhang Fengyi alongside Gong Li.
The 1993 film, directed by Chen Kaige, remains one of the most internationally honoured Chinese-language films ever made. TV Report noted that it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and was named among Time magazine’s 100 all-time great films.
Lu’s career was rooted in the theatre. Born in Shandong province in August 1925, he enrolled at the Nanjing National Drama School in 1947. In 1954 he joined the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, where he remained for the rest of his life and was recognised as a national first-class actor.
Over more than seven decades on stage, Lu appeared in more than 70 plays, including Thunderstorm, Li Bai and The Wild Man. He was a mainstay of the theatre world, a performer whose face was widely recognised even when his name was not.
On screen, Lu was also familiar as the seasoned Editor-in-Chief Chen in the sitcom Stories from the Editorial Office, affectionately known to audiences as Old Chen. But it was Master Guan, in only a small number of scenes, who left the most lasting impression on cinema audiences.
Colleagues remembered Lu as a performer who treated every show as a fresh experience rather than a simple repeat, an approach younger actors have cited as a lasting lesson. Fellow performers also described him as one of the finest actors they had known, though never among the most famous names of his era.
Lu’s death closes a 72-year acting career that ran from the Beijing stage in 1954 to his final years as a revered elder of Chinese theatre, and tributes from fans and fellow artists continued to follow the announcement.
