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Nicholas Tse was in mainland China, preparing for a concert tour, when the news came.

He put everything down and flew home to Hong Kong; no statement about rescheduling, no PR announcement, just a son on a plane.

His father would have called that “not cool enough.”

His father would also have understood completely.

Patrick Tse Yin, or Sei Gor (四哥), which literally translates to “Fourth Brother”, died peacefully in hospital pn Monday (20 July); he was 89.

His daughter Jennifer confirmed the news on Facebook, writing that he had passed “surrounded by the love of his family, after a period of declining health.”

She asked for privacy as the family grieved together.

He Did Not Just Act, He Endured

The man they were grieving had spent seven decades proving that performers do not stop.

Born Tse Ka-yuk in Guangzhou, he moved to Hong Kong as a child and made his film debut in 1954.

Over the next 70 years, he appeared in more than 200 films and television productions — becoming the romantic leading man of the 1960s, disappearing to Canada in the late 1980s, then returning to reinvent himself entirely.

Younger audiences knew him as the villainous coach Hung in Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (2001).

Their parents had grown up watching him in The Shell Game (1980). Their grandparents remembered him from the beginning.

Affectionately known throughout the industry as “Fourth Brother” — Sei Gor, which literally translates to “Fourth Brother — he was not merely famous.

He was foundational.

They Said Thank You, He Said Not Yet

In 2019, the Hong Kong Film Awards gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The industry’s way of saying: thank you, we see everything you have done, you can rest now.

He did not rest.

In 2022, at 85, he won Best Actor at the same ceremony — competitively — for his role as a retired assassin in the 2021 black comedy-drama Time (殺出個黃昏), becoming the oldest recipient in the event’s history.

The industry said thank you.

He responded by proving he was not finished.

The Final Curtain, On His Own Terms

On Weibo, Nicholas wrote that his father’s lifelong motto was “the show must go on.”

He asked fans not to cry or be overly sad — his father, he said, would have found that “not cool enough.”

Remember him full of charm and smiles instead.

It is the kind of farewell only a showman could script for himself; cheerful, a little vain, completely on-brand.

Tse is survived by his son Nicholas, his daughter Jennifer, and more than 70 years of work that is not going anywhere.

The show, as it turns out, does go on, just without him in it.

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