Gregory Charles Rivers, an Australian actor who made his name acting in Hong Kong TVB dramas and jokingly referred to himself as TVB's "token Caucasian", has died. He was 58.
According to Hong Kong news reports, Rivers was found unconscious and unresponsive in Tai Au Mun Village on Feb 2. The police confirmed his death upon arrival at the scene.
Rivers, who also went by the Cantonese stage name ‘Ho Gwok Wing’, was born in 1965 at his hometown of Gympie, Australia. In a 2016 interview with Australia's ABC news, Rivers recalled that while studying medicine at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s, he met some students from Hong Kong who introduced him to Cantopop, and it inspired him to give up his studies and move to Hong Kong in 1988 in the hope of starting a career in entertainment.
Rivers had previously worked as a driver for Cantopop superstar Alan Tam during one of his concerts in Sydney, and within two weeks of landing in Hong Kong, some of Tam's band members recognised him and invited him to sing on two of Tam's shows.
A few months later, Rivers auditioned for the role of a Caucasian character in a TVB drama and got the role even though he admits that "my acting was terrible, and my Cantonese was terrible".
"The audition was really bad but they didn't have a second choice," he recalled in the ABC News interview. "I ended up being TVB's token Caucasian for 20 years straight!"
After making his TVB debut in 1988's Twilight Of A Nation, Rivers went on to appear in over 200 dramas over the course of his 20-year stint with TVB, most of them as a stereotypical Caucasian character.
Rivers was diagnosed with skin cancer in 2017, though he successfully underwent surgery and remained cancer-free after that. In 2018, however, Rivers was diagnosed with arrhythmia, and was reported to be in heavy debt after undergoing two surgeries for the heart condition.
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