Jimmy Wang Yu

A swimmer in front of the camera

Wang Zhengquan was born on 28 March 1943 in Shanghai, to a family from Wuxi, Jiangsu. He moved to Hong Kong in 1961 and studied at Chu Hai College. Before film, his sport was swimming: he held a record at the Hong Kong Chinese Swimming Competition and played water polo. Sources disagree about his martial arts training, but all of them note his athlete's build.

He started as an extra in the Cantonese film The Ghostly Murderer (1964). In July 1964, Shaw Brothers held an open casting call for the lead in Chang Cheh's Tiger Boy. Wang Yu won it and became the director's leading man.

The one-armed swordsman

The breakthrough was Chang Cheh's The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), which took more than HK$1 million and broke the local box-office record. It set his screen persona: the cold, proud young hero who fights back after being maimed. The Assassin (1967), Golden Swallow (1968) and Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969) followed, and he became the highest-paid kung fu star in Hong Kong.

In 1970 he wrote, directed and starred in The Chinese Boxer, shot in Korea and the highest-grossing film of the year in Hong Kong. It trades the sword for bare-handed fighting and is often described as one of the first modern kung fu films, ahead of the Bruce Lee wave.

Taiwan, the flying guillotine and Australia

That same year he left Shaw Brothers for Taiwan, where he made more than a dozen films in 1971 and 1972, including Invincible Sword (1971) and Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman (1971), a crossover with Shintaro Katsu's blind Japanese swordsman.

He also directed his own fight films: The Brave and the Evil (1971), One Armed Boxer (1972), Beach of the War Gods (1973) and Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), in which a one-armed boxer faces champions of rival schools and an assassin armed with a flying guillotine. It is now a cult film that Quentin Tarantino names among his favourites.

In 1975 he starred in and co-directed, with Brian Trenchard-Smith, The Man from Hong Kong, a Golden Harvest co-production with an Australian company, staging the action with the Australian stunt crew. He then set up his own company, directed Return of the Chinese Boxer (1977) and co-directed The One Armed Swordsmen with actor David Chiang.

Producer and late return

In the 1980s he moved into business and only made cameos, as in Sammo Hung's Millionaires' Express (1986). He acted in and executive-produced Island of Fire (1990) with Jackie Chan, and produced Ann Hui's Song of the Exile (1990). In 2002 the American comedy Kung Pow! Enter the Fist reused footage from his Tiger and Crane Fist.

In 2010 Peter Chan brought him back for Dragon (Wu Xia, 2011), opposite Donnie Yen, as a fearsome clan leader, earning Best Supporting Actor nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards. In 2013 he won Best Actor at the Taipei Film Festival for Chung Mong-hong's Soul, and in 2019 Ang Lee presented him with the Golden Horse Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jimmy Wang Yu died in Taiwan on 5 April 2022. The New York Times obituary called him the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee.