Hong Kong film tycoon whose studios and TV company enjoyed huge international success
Sir Run Run Shaw, who has died aged 106, was the most famous of the Shaw brothers who became synonymous with Chinese films in south-east Asia. He started with one cinema in pre-second world war Singapore: by the time Japan invaded, he had more than 130 houses. After the war he moved operations to Hong Kong, spotting a market dominated by foreign films and sub-standard local productions. When he saw a picture from his studio that was no good, he would throw it away and start again.
The Shaw brothers came from a family of businessmen in Ningbo on China's eastern coast, where people have been accustomed to migrate for generations, and where Run Run was born. In the mid-1920s, four of the six brothers became involved in films after the eldest, Runje, acquired a theatre as a bad debt.
In the frenetic film world of 30s Shanghai, Runje's company had to fight off the challenge of rivals. He soon sent his brothers Run Run, Runde and Runme to Singapore and Hong Kong, where they distributed his films to circumvent the boycott organised by his competitors, and set up their own studios. By the late 50s Run Run had moved to Hong Kong with Runme, taking over from his less dynamic brother Runde, and beginning a phase of mass-scale lavish production. In the first full year he produced 20 Mandarin films and 12 Cantonese at the Shaw studio in Clear Water Bay.
Now it was Run Run's turn to take on the opposition, waging fierce competitive battle with the Cathay Organisation. By the late 60s he had swept the field, shifting the focus from kung fu to sword-fight films and back again, to match changes in film-going fashion.
The 70s were the high tide for film-making as overseas Chinese communities became more affluent. There was a shift from old-fashioned Cantonese movies to more contemporary themes – including a surprising amount of sex – in Mandarin. Run Run ran his empire with a tight hand, judging the exact moment when to change. He also took key decisions on stories, scripts and casting.
No one would say that his films were high art. In Kiss of Death (1973), a teenage girl is raped and infected with a virulent form of venereal disease: she then takes revenge on her attackers. But his studios also turned out dozens of "family films" in which virtue is defended to either a happy or bitter end. Period dramas from famous Chinese classical tales, such as The Water Margin (1972), were popular too. So were history films featuring the decline of dynasties, scheming eunuchs and self-sacrificing concubines.
By the 70s, Run Run's 46-acre Shaw Movie Town studio was known worldwide and he had developed profitable side deals with Hollywood studios and even one with the Hammer horror studio in Britain that resulted in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), among others. One of Shaw's best-known US films was the sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982).
Every year he chose 40 applicants out of over 2,000 hopefuls from all over Asia, coaching his starlets personally. He was happy to appear in public with one or more on his arm. He was reputed to have a larger personal fortune than any film-maker in the world. About 1.5 million people weekly saw a Shaw film in Hong Kong or one of his outlets in Japan, Hawaii and the US and Canadian Chinatowns. The films emerged from the studio at the rate of 40 a year.
By 1978 Run Run had conquered the heights of colonial Hong Kong. He was knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. He attended the opening of the newly established Hong Kong arts festival standing side by side with its governor Sir Murray MacLehose. In the post-Mao Zedong era Run Run also began to insure politically with the mainland, donating millions of dollars to build schools and hospitals, especially in his native Ningbo. The influence of the "Shanghai clique" who had fled to Hong Kong in 1949 was waning: Run Run belonged to the "Ningbo clique" which was on the rise. One of its members was a shipping owner called Tung Chee-hwa – who would become Hong Kong's Beijing-picked chief executive at the handover in 1997. In 1995 Run Run and Tung joined a select group of Hong Kong tycoons to visit Beijing for a briefing from China's then president, Jiang Zemin. They could set their hearts at rest, Jiang assured them. Hong Kong's prosperity would remain intact.
But Run Run had long before moved smartly with the times to become much more than a producer of money-spinning but mostly pot-boiling films. He spotted the potential for commercial television precisely at the point when cinema-going started to decline. Setting up Hong Kong's second TV network — TVB — he was able simultaneously to establish a new outlet for his studio's productions. Shaw Movie Town became effectively Shaw TV Town. TVB became the most popular station in Hong Kong, with an even bigger audience (using illegal aerials) in neighbouring Guangdong province. By the late 80s TVB was also the largest supplier of films to the Asian TV market, with its Cantonese language output dubbed into eight languages.
Run Run was now the executive chairman of an Asia-wide communications empire – still located among the old film sets on Clear Water Bay Road. He had completed the virtuous circle of Chinese businessman turned philanthropist, coming a long way from his single cinema in prewar Shanghai. He finally resigned from his executive positions on TVB in 2011. He was only known to have made one mistake in his life: he had failed to spot the talent potential of the kung fu king Bruce Lee. But he never made the bigger mistake of taking political sides on China's offshore island. "Politics, I don't understand much," he said. "What I want is leave us alone, let us get on."
Shaw's first wife, Lily Wong Mee-chun, died in 1987. He is survived by his second wife, Mona; and by two sons and two daughters from his first marriage.
• Run Run Shaw, businessman, born 23 November 1907; died 7 January 2014