Chow Yun-fat

Chow Yun-fat, also known earlier as Donald Chow, was born on 18 May 1955 and is a Hong Kong actor and filmmaker. Over more than forty-five years, he has acted in over 100 TV series and films. His range covers action, melodrama, comedy, and historical drama, earning him three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor.

He grew up on Lamma Island, Hong Kong, where his father worked on a Shell Oil tanker and his mother was a cleaner and vegetable farmer. The family lived without electricity in a farming community. Chow helped his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets at dawn, then worked in the fields in the afternoons. When he was ten, they moved to Kowloon. At 17, he left school and took odd jobs as a bellboy, postman, camera salesman, and taxi driver to support his family.

At 18, in 1973, he answered a newspaper ad for TVB’s actor training program. After a year of training, he signed a three-year contract and began acting in soap operas. He gained notice in dramas like *The Killer* (1976) and *Hotel* (1976). His breakout came with *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly* (1979), followed by *The Bund* (1980), a series about 1930s Shanghai gangsters that made him a star across Asia.

Chow aimed to move into film and made his movie debut in 1976 after signing an exclusive contract with Goldig Films, then Hong Kong’s third-largest film company. Goldig, founded and solely funded by Indonesian Chinese businessman Gouw Hiap Kian, produced and distributed over 150 movies from 1972 to 1982. Most of Chow’s 1970s Goldig films earned over HK$1 million each—better than his early-1980s films like *Modern Heroes*, *Soul Ash*, *The Bund*, and *The Bund Part 2*. *Hot Blood* (1977) grossed HK$1.62 million, ranking fourth highest that year. But after leaving Goldig, his low-budget films in the early 1980s flopped, and he was briefly called “Box Office Poison.”

His turnaround came with director John Woo’s 1986 gangster action-melodrama *A Better Tomorrow*. It swept Asian box offices, made Chow and Woo megastars, and won Chow his first Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor. It was then the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history and set a new standard for gangster films. Chow quit TV entirely. With his new image, he made many “gun fu” or “heroic bloodshed” films, including *A Better Tomorrow II* (1987), *Prison on Fire* (1987), *Prison on Fire II* (1991), *The Killer* (1989), *A Better Tomorrow 3* (1990), and *Hard Boiled* (1992). He won his second Best Actor award for the crime thriller *City on Fire* (1987), which inspired Quentin Tarantino’s *Reservoir Dogs*.

Chow is best known for playing honorable tough guys—cops or criminals—but also starred in comedies like *Diary of a Big Man* (1988) and *Now You See Love, Now You Don’t* (1992), and romantic blockbusters such as *Love in a Fallen City* (1984) and *An Autumn’s Tale* (1987), for which he won a Golden Horse Award for Best Actor. He blended these personas in the 1989 film *God of Gamblers*, directed by Wong Jing, playing a suave charmer, a broad comedian, and an action hero. It broke Hong Kong’s all-time box office record, spawned a series of gambling films, and led to comic sequels starring Andy Lau and Stephen Chow. His tough but youthful look earned him the nickname “Babyface Killer.”

His other notable Asian films include *All About Ah-Long* (1989), *Curse of the Golden Flower* (2006), *Let the Bullets Fly* (2010), *From Vegas to Macau* (2014), and *Project Gutenberg* (2018). He made his Hollywood debut in *The Replacement Killers* (1998), earning praise for his understated performance. In the West, he is also known for *The Corruptor* (1999), *Anna and the King* (1999), *Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon* (2000)—for which he was nominated for Best Actor at the 2001 Hong Kong Film Awards and the 27th Saturn Awards—as well as *Bulletproof Monk* (2003) and *Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End* (2007). He later reprised his iconic “Tequila” persona in the video game *Stranglehold* (2007), produced by John Woo. Chow is credited with helping bring Hong Kong gangster films to international prominence.