Chow Yun-Fat

Born on May 18, 1955, on Lamma, a small island off of Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor, Chow moved with his family to Hong Kong proper in 1965. Influenced early on by the Cantonese Opera, the yearly Goddess of the Sea festivals, and American movies, he got his start as a professional actor while still in his teens. Chow's first break came in 1973, when he answered a newspaper ad by the TVB, a Hong Kong TV station. He enrolled in the station's training program for young actors, training in the company of friend and future director Ringo Lam. While working for the TVB, Chow performed in a number of soap operas. In the early '80s, he would star in the station's popular series Shanghai Beach, earning lasting fame as the ultra-cool gangster Hui Man-Keung.

Chow broke into films in the mid-'70s, winning a lead role in the forgettable Massage Girls in 1976. He had his first critical success five years later as the star of Ann Hui's The Story of Wu Viet; unfortunately, the acclaim he earned for his portrayal of a South Vietnamese soldier was subsequently overshadowed by a period of personal and professional problems marked by a string of largely unimpressive films and a short-lived marriage with fellow TV star Candice Yu On-On.

Chow's luck began to change in the mid-'80s, when he won a Best Actor award from the Asian Pacific Film Festival and Taiwan's prestigious Golden Horse for his performance in Leung Po-Chi's Hong Kong 1941 (1984), a romantic drama set against the backdrop of World War II. Two years later, he had his true breakthrough when then-obscure director John Woo cast him as hitman Mark Gor in A Better Tomorrow, a hugely influential movie responsible for the birth of the Hong Kong gangster film genre. The character of Gor has remained one of Chow's most popular to date, and made him -- to say nothing of Woo -- an instant star in Asia. The actor's portrayal won him a prestigious Hong Kong Film Award, and Gor became something of an icon in the action genre, influencing such international directors as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

Chow would star in the two Better Tomorrow sequels, which followed in 1988 and 1989, but in the meantime he continued to prove his dramatic and comedic abilities in a number of other films. The same year that he starred in A Better Tomorrow, he played an orchestra conductor caught up in a seemingly eternal love affair in Dream Lovers, a fantasy romance directed by Tony Au. The following year, he won another Golden Horse as the romantic lead in An Autumn's Tale and further turned on the charm in the romantic comedy My Will, I Will. However, 1987 proved that Chow's greatest claim to fame on an international level was his status as an action star. That year, he caused a sensation in Hong Kong with his portrayal of a prison inmate in old friend Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire. The film astonished audiences with both its excessive violence and bloodshed and the strength of the fraternal bond between Chow and Tony Leung Kar-Fai, who played a young inmate under Chow's tutelage. Chow earned a Hong Kong Film Award nomination for his work in the film, and that same year he won the same award for his portrayal of an undercover cop in Lam's City on Fire. A hugely influential film that was the inspiration for Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, City widened Chow's American fan base and further cemented his status as one of Asia's most bankable stars.

Further screen immortality was granted to Chow when he played a hitman trying to make good in Woo's The Killer (1989). The film was a huge success and is widely viewed as the director's stylistic masterpiece, a tribute to such directors as Kubrick, Peckinpah, and Scorsese and an inspiration to any number of international filmmakers. The following year, Chow was able to combine his prowess as an action star with his talent for comedy and romance in Woo's Once a Thief, in which he, Leslie Cheung, and Cherie Chung played a trio of orphans who have grown up to be art thieves. The film was not nearly as violent as most of Woo's movies tended to be, but Chow was back in full hard-man regalia for his next major outing, Lam's Full Contact (1992). An extremely stylish action film, it starred the actor as a nightclub bouncer bent on revenge. As such, it was packed with the type of well-choreographed violence that had endeared him to audiences everywhere: one of the film's highlights featured Chow single-handedly fighting off three machete-wielding gangsters with a three-inch butterfly knife.

The same year he starred in Full Contact, Chow also had one of his most celebrated collaborations with Woo, Hard-Boiled. Cast as a tough cop with a heart of gold who teams up with a precariously unstable undercover agent (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), Chow did his part to help amass one of the highest body counts in cinematic history, and in doing so, he further exhibited the kind of graceful will to destruction that had become his trademark. The film was Woo's last before he departed for Hollywood, and was the inspiration for his terrifically successful Face/Off, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in variants of the Chow/Leung roles.

Having attained such unparalleled popularity in Asia, it was almost inevitable that Chow would make the crossover to American films. He did so in 1998 as the star of Antoine Fuqua's The Replacement Killers. Unfortunately, the film -- which cast Chow as an assassin alongside Mira Sorvino -- received largely negative reviews, and sank at the box office. The following year, Chow played a man on the other side of the law in The Corruptor, starring as an NYPD officer in charge of keeping peace in Chinatown. Like Chow's previous film, The Corruptor didn't do as well as expected, though it allowed the actor to continue to demonstrate his action prowess. That same year, he showed his softer side in Anna and the King, playing the titular King of Siam (Thailand) opposite Jodie Foster as a strong-willed governess. It was Chow's first mainstream, non-action Hollywood film, something that further signaled recognition of the actor as one of the cinema's true international stars.

Perhaps ironically, Chow would find his biggest crossover success with a film steeped in Chinese folklore, director Ang Lee's martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Released to standing ovations at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, the picture -- which cast Chow as a warrior haunted by the unavenged death of a friend -- enjoyed a long and healthy life at the North American box office, eventually becoming the most successful foreign-language picture ever released in the States up to that point. Better yet, Chow's work was universally cited by critics as one of the actor's most soulful, compassionate turns. Although Tiger would garner an impressive ten Academy Award nominations, Chow and his equally deserving co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi were denied nods in a year that was admittedly over-crowded with Oscar-caliber performances.

Despite Crouching Tiger's success, Chow was largely absent from the big screen over the next several years, surfacing only for the action-fantasy Bulletproof Monk. While a fairly satisfying actioner for undemanding fans, Bulletproof Monk still failed to capture that old Hong Kong magic and many were left wondering whether Chow would ever live up to his former glory under the direction of a stateside filmmaker. For his next film, a dramatic adaptation of author Ann Hui's novel -The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, Chow would head back to China to portray an amateur opera singer and con man who takes advantage of a trusting sexagenarian. Though the 2006 film garnered considerable praise back home -- where it was nominated for three Golden Horse awards -- American audiences would next see Chow in House of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou's The Curse of the Golden Flower. A lavish and romantic period adventure set against the backdrop of the Tang Dynasty, The Curse of the Golden Flower presented a distinguished-looking Chow as the oppressive emperor struggling against a fierce rebellion. Though The Curse of the Golden Flower featured stunning cinematography courtesy of Zhao Xiaoding and took home multiple honors at the Hong Kong Film Awards, many fans felt that wasn't as cohesive as such previous Yimou efforts as Hero and the aforementioned House of Flying Daggers, and perhaps as a result, the film performed rather poorly at the American box office. Chow's next film, however, was almost certain to become a worldwide blockbuster.

Despite seemingly shying away from big-budget Hollywood efforts since 2003's Bulletproof Monk, Chow would make a swashbuckling return to the world stage as cunning Chinese pirate Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The eagerly anticipated third installment of the highly profitable Disney film series, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End presented Chow in the minor yet pivotal role of the one man who may hold the key to preserving the Age of Piracy against the nefarious East India Trading Company and it's dreaded leader Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). That same year, rumors that Chow had made a list of diva-like demands in order to appear in old cohort Woo's The Battle of Red Cliff would seemingly be substantiated when the star suddenly dropped out of the troubled production. Later, when the smoke settled on the incident, Woo veteran Tony Leung Chiu-Wai stepped in to fill the role originally intended for his Hard-Boiled co-star as Chow announced that he would indeed appear in the film after all -- ostensibly in a different role than the one Leung had replaced him in. Though all of the confusion surrounding the perplexing incident no doubt had fans wondering just what would become of the film that was set to reunite Woo and Chow for their first feature together in well over a decade, there was cause for celebration when it was announced that Strangehold -- the oft-discussed video-game sequel to Woo's 1992 action classic Hard-Boiled -- would finally see the light of day in 2007, and that Chow himself would be reprising his role as trigger-happy Tequila for the Woo-directed third-person shooter. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide