This is the 71st instalment in a biweekly series profiling major Hong Kong pop culture figures of recent decades.
Back in the first decade of his entertainment career, which began in the mid-1980s, Michael Tse Tin-wah was a face you recognised but a name you might have struggled to place.
He was a backup dancer hitting his marks behind Cantopop icons; a fiercely loyal triad henchman swinging a machete in the Young and Dangerous films; a dependable character actor equipped with a sinister, lopsided smirk.
But his endurance paid off. In 2009, after more than two decades of playing the sidekick, the villain or the comic relief, he was cast in a supporting role in the TVB police procedural series E.U.
