ProfileAlex To’s 40-year Cantopop career: R&B origins, defiant comebacks, acting triumphs
The now 64-year-old Hong Kong-born singer and actor remains one of the industry’s most enduring and unpredictable figures
Long before he packed out the Hong Kong Coliseum for his 40th-anniversary Get Up concerts last October, Alex To Tak-wai was busy changing the fundamental rhythm of the city’s pop music.
Emerging from the nightclub circuit in the mid-1980s with a kinetic, Michael Jackson-inspired stage presence, To eschewed the standard ballads of his contemporaries to introduce R&B and Western funk to mainstream Cantopop.
Today, at 64 – though his age-defying appearance suggests otherwise – he remains one of the industry’s most enduring and unpredictable figures, having navigated shifting musical trends, high-profile scandals and a recent, critically acclaimed pivot to dramatic acting.
Musical royalty and the Michael Jackson connection
Born in Hong Kong in 1962 and raised partly in Malaysia, To comes from musical royalty: his mother, Chang Loo, reigned as Shanghai’s legendary Queen of Chinese Song in the 1950s and 60s, while his father, Ollie Delfino, was a prominent Filipino jazz drummer and music director.
