Hailed in the Los Angeles Times as "The Coolest Actor in the World", the endearingly plebeian yet strikingly handsome Chow Yun Fat was a fixture of Hong Kong film and TV from his debut in the early 1970s. He is best known by American and British cultists as a hard-boiled action hero specializing in portrayals of honorable hitmen, gangsters, thieves and trigger-happy cops. In Asia, Chow is a superstar, with extensive credits in a variety of genres including romances, both period and contemporary; dramas; slapstick comedies and supernatural thrillers. He is that rare Hong Kong star who has won admiration of both the common folk and the cineastes by segueing smoothly from commercial to arty fare. Chow is most convincing playing good-humored 'Joes' characterized by self-sacrificing loyalty and a lack of self-consciousness. Even when he plays criminals, he is rarely truly bad, and if cast in the romantic lead, he rarely gets the girl. Hong Kong audiences love to see him suffer before overcoming incredible odds.
Chow escaped an impoverished rural childhood on Lamma Island, living without electricity and rising at 4 a.m. everyday to sell dim sum before moving to Kowloon where he attended a Maoist School. As the Cultural Revolution raged on the mainland, the pre-teen Chow took part in the 1967 Hong Kong riots, prompting his worried mother to transfer him to a boarding school established by the Nationalist Party Kuomintang. He quit school at 17 and worked as a bellboy, postman and camera salesman before responding to a newspaper ad for "free" acting lessons at TVB--a leading Hong Kong TV operation which produced broadcasting at home and handled video distribution throughout Asia.
Chow completed the year-long training program and signed a three-year contract with the studio for a modest sum of less than HK $500 per month. He became a familiar face in soaps that were exported internationally and by 1976, Chow had gained notice as the young hunk on the primetime soap "Hotel". That same year, he made his film acting debut with "The Reincarnation" and had his first feature lead in "Massage Girls". Chow found himself in a strong position as he renegotiated his TVB contract, and stayed on for another ten years. In 1980, he increased his popularity with the TV drama "Shanghai Bund" as a white-suited crime boss in 1920s Shanghai. The show was a hit throughout Asia--including Shanghai itself when Communist restrictions on imported programming were lifted in the 90s. (The episodes were subsequently re-edited into two features in 1983).
Chow continued to shift between films and TV throughout the first half of the 80s. Most of his early features were forgettable genre entries in the world's third largest national cinema (where stars commonly appear in over half a dozen films per year). Chow scored his first critical and popular success with Ann Hui's "The Story of Woo Viet" (1981) as a Vietnamese refugee who escapes to Hong Kong. He won further acclaim and the Taiwanese Golden Horse Award for Best Actor for the period drama "Hong Kong 1941" (1984) as a Northerner who comes to Hong Kong where he befriends and nearly betrays a coolie. Nonetheless, after a string of commercial failures, he was being written off as a has-been when, in 1986, he teamed with writer-director John Woo, then similarly undervalued, to collaborate on a film that would transform both of their careers.
Chow consolidated his international stardom headlining Woo's box-office champion "A Better Tomorrow" (1986). "I was looking for a man who was a modern knight . . ." recalled Woo in the Los Angeles Times in 1995. "The kind of man with real guts, who can stand up for justice." Though Chow was playing a gangster, his loyalty and sense of honor more than filled the bill for Woo's landmark crime drama. Reputed to be the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history, the film set the standard for HK gangster films and inspired Woo's "A Better Tomorrow II" (1987) and Tsui Hark's "A Better Tomorrow III" (1990), also starring Chow. He and Woo also teamed for "The Killer" (1989), "Once A Thief" (1991) and "Hard-Boiled" (1992) and their creative partnership has garnered comparisons to those of John Ford and John Wayne and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Chow seemed uniquely suited for the director's distinctive blend of over-the-top action, florid emotions and astounding sentimentality. Moreover, he came to define "cool," as he handled cigarettes and firearms with equally devastating flair.
Courted by Communist China to continue making films in Hong Kong when the British colony reverted to its control in 1997, Chow chose Hollywood instead, relocating to the USA with plans to resume collaborating with the transplanted Woo after mastering American English. Resisting studio offers for him to play the "gangster of Chinatown" roles, he remained idle for more than two years following his last Hong Kong film, "Peace Hotel" (1995), before making his American film debut in the Woo-executive produced "The Replacement Killers" (1998), playing an assassin who teams with a female forger (Mira Sorvino). Unfortunately, the routine actioner was hardly a star-making vehicle for Chow, still uncomfortable with his adopted language, and the "The Corrupter" (1999), which paired him with Mark Wahlberg, was an equally uninspiring tale, unworthy of the established Hong Kong veteran.
Breaking out of action star mode, Chow gave English-speaking audiences a crash course in his range as King Mongkut in "Anna and the King" (also 1999), bringing the perfect mix of enlightenment, compassion and aloofness to the role. The charismatic Chow enjoyed a real screen chemistry with two-time Oscar-winner Jodie Foster as the British governess brought to Siam to educate the royal children, and though the lush historical epic did sluggish box office stateside, it managed to take in over $120 million worldwide. His next film, Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000), pairing him with Michelle Yeoh, promised to be his biggest US hit, despite boasting an all-Asian cast speaking in Mandarin dialect. Fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, who won international acclaim for his work on "The Matrix" (1999), supplied state-of-the-art martial arts stunts, drawing spontaneous applause from the audiences at Cannes for the gravity-defying fight between two women 20 minutes into the film, and Chow bestowed his 19th-century martial arts master with a centered calm to contrast nicely with his character's violent outbursts. His next role came in the form of a Zen-calm martial arts master whose duty is to protect a powerful ancient scroll in "Bulletproof Monk" (2003). Chow, who was joined by Seann William Scott, displayed a flurry of high-flying acrobatics and martial arts action as Scott added much of the film's quick wit humor.
Some of today's most famous Hong Kong entertainers, including Andy Lau, Chow Yun-Fat, and Cannes' best actor Tony Leung, were TVB stars in the 1980s and 90s
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