Chow Yun-fat

From Lamma Island to the TVB studios

Chow Yun-fat was born on 18 May 1955 on Lamma Island, off Hong Kong, into a farming family with no electricity. He helped his mother sell snacks in the street, left school at 17 and worked as a courier, driver and salesman. In 1973 he joined the actor training class of the TVB television network. He spent ten years in television series, and The Bund, a 1980 serial about the gangs of 1930s Shanghai, made him a star across Asia. He never trained in martial arts: unlike Jackie Chan or Sammo Hung he did not come out of an opera school, and unlike Jet Li he never practised competitive wushu.

John Woo's hero

His early film roles in the 1980s were in dramas and comedies: Ann Hui's The Story of Woo Viet in 1981, Hong Kong 1941 in 1984, which earned him his first Golden Horse best actor award in Taiwan. Everything changed in 1986 with John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. As Mark Lee, in a trench coat and sunglasses with a pistol in each hand, he invented the hero of "heroic bloodshed", the Hong Kong crime film in which gunfights are choreographed like kung fu bouts. The film broke local box-office records and won him the Hong Kong Film Award for best actor in 1987. Ringo Lam's City on Fire the same year brought a second; All About Ah-Long, in 1989, a third. An Autumn's Tale gave him a second Golden Horse.

With Woo he went on to make The Killer in 1989 and Hard Boiled in 1992, two films Quentin Tarantino and American action directors cite as models. He fights in them without martial arts but with the codes of the genre: slides, dives, mid-air reloads, two-handed pistols. Wong Jing's God of Gamblers in 1989 gave him another cult character, the gambler Ko Chun, whom he revisited in the three From Vegas to Macau films of the 2010s.

Hollywood and Crouching Tiger

Having moved to the United States in the mid-1990s, he made The Replacement Killers (1998), The Corruptor and Anna and the King (1999) without finding his audience. Ang Lee then offered him Li Mu Bai, the sword master of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Chow had never held a sword: he trained for months with the team of Yuen Woo-ping, the choreographer of The Matrix, and Michelle Yeoh later said he worked relentlessly. The film shows an economical master who disarms rather than strikes, and his duel in the bamboo forest with Zhang Ziyi remains one of the most quoted scenes in martial arts cinema. Crouching Tiger won four Oscars and grossed more than 200 million dollars worldwide.

He followed with Bulletproof Monk (2003), playing a Tibetan monk guarding a scroll in an American kung fu film where his fights are shared with doubles, then Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), as a Tang dynasty emperor, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), as pirate lord Sao Feng. The 2010s brought him back to China: Confucius (2010), Let the Bullets Fly (2010), The Monkey King (2014), in which he is the Jade Emperor, and Project Gutenberg (2018).

Legacy

Chow Yun-fat gave Hong Kong action cinema a hero who owes nothing to traditional martial arts, and whose elegance in combat comes from his gaze and his timing rather than technique. For a practitioner, Crouching Tiger remains the reference: the jian, the Chinese straight sword, is handled with the restraint of a Wudang expert. Named Asian Filmmaker of the Year at the Busan festival in 2023, he has said he wants to leave most of his fortune to charity. He is still working, from One More Chance (2023) to Detective Chinatown 1900 (2025).