Chow Yun-Fat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Yun-Fat Chow)
Jump to: navigation, search
This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chow.
Chow Yun-Fat

Chinese name 周潤發 (Traditional)
Chinese name 周润发 (Simplified)
Born May 18, 1955 (1955-05-18) (age 52)
Lamma, Hong Kong
Years active 1974 - present
Spouse(s) On-on Yu (1983-1983)
Jasmine Chow (1986-)

Chow Yun-Fat (traditional Chinese: 周潤發; simplified Chinese: 周润发; pinyin: Zhōu Rùnfā) (born May 18, 1955) is a Chinese actor. He is one of the most famous actors in Asia and a major actor in the Hong Kong film industry. He mainly plays in dramatic movies. He won Hong Kong's "best actor" award three times and Taiwan's twice.

Contents

Chow was born on the tiny offshore Hong Kong's Lamma Island to a housewife mother and an oil rigger father. Of Hakka origins, he grew up in a farming community in a house with no electricity. He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell dim sum on the streets and in the afternoons he went to work in the fields. His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. At seventeen, he quit school to help support the family by doing odd jobs - bellboy, postman, camera salesman, taxi driver. His life started to change when he responded to a newspaper ad and his actor-trainee application was accepted by TVB, the local television station. He signed a three-year contract with the studio and made his acting debut. With his striking good looks and easy-going style, Chow became a heartthrob and a familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.

It did not take long for Chow to become a household name in Hong Kong following his role in the hit series The Bund in 1980. The Bund, about the rise and fall of a gangster in 1930's Shanghai, made him a superstar. It was one of the most popular TV series ever made in Hong Kong and was a hit throughout Asia, including Shanghai itself, where the streets were emptied during the times it was broadcast.

Although Chow continued his TV success, his ultimate goal was to become a big screen actor. However, his occasional ventures onto the big screens with low-budget movies were disastrous. Success finally came when he teamed up with a then relatively unknown director John Woo in the 1986 gangster action-melodrama A Better Tomorrow, which swept the box offices in parts of Asia and established both Chow and Woo as megastars. A Better Tomorrow won him his first Best Actor award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It is reputed to be the highest grossing film in Hong Kong history at the time, and it set the standard for Hong Kong gangster films. Taking the opportunity, Chow quit TV entirely. With his new image from A Better Tomorrow, he made many more 'gun fu' or 'heroic bloodshed' movies, again teaming up with Woo, such as A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987), Prison on Fire, Prison on Fire II, The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow 3 (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992).

Chow may be best known, especially in the West, for playing honorable tough guys, whether cops or criminals, but he is a versatile performer. He has starred in comedies like Diary of a Big Man (1988) and Now You See Love, Now You Don't (1992) or romantic blockbusters such as Love in a Fallen City (1984) and An Autumn's Tale (1987). He brought together his disparate personae in the 1989 film God of Gamblers (Du Shen), directed by the prolific Wong Jing, in which he was by turns suave charmer, broad comedian and action hero. The film surprised many and turned out immensely popular, broke Hong Kong's all-time box office record, and spawned a series of gambling movies, as well as several more comic sequels starring Andy Lau and Stephen Chow.

The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-Fat "the coolest actor in the world." At that point, he had not even made a single American film, but he had already become an icon. Being one of the hottest screen commodities in Hong Kong, Chow moved to Hollywood in the mid-'90s in an attempt to duplicate his success on an international scale. His first two films Replacement Killers (1998) and The Corruptor (1999) were box-office disappointments. His next film Anna and the King (1999) did better, but the success was mostly credited to actress Jodie Foster. He returned to Asia for the (2000) film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it became a winner at both the international box office and the Oscars. In 2004, he made a surprise cameo in the mainland Chinese indie-hit Waiting Alone. In 2006, he teamed up with Gong Li to star in the new film, Curse of the Golden Flower by Zhang Yimou.

Chow is still waiting for the type of success he once enjoyed in Hong Kong. He once admitted to a Hong Kong reporter that his ultimate goal is to win an Oscar as an actor. When asked what if it never comes true, he replied "I would just have to laugh about it..."

In 2007 Chow played the antagonist pirate captain Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The character played by Chow, however was censored in mainland China. As proclaimed by mainland officials, "He also has a long beard and long nails, whose image is still in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonising the Chinese." The censors also cut Chow’s line in which he states "Welcome to Singapore", because it hints Singapore is a land of pirates" Xinhua stated. It quoted Zhang Pimin, deputy head of the film bureau of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television as saying the cuts had been made "according to the country’s relevant regulations on film censorship," and "China’s actual conditions".[1]

Chow has married twice. First to Candice Yu (Chinese: 余安安; pinyin: Yú Ānan) in 1983, who was an actress from Asia Television Ltd, TVB's rival. But the marriage did not last long and the two broke up after nine months. Chow has since married Singaporean Jasmine Tan (simplified Chinese: 陈萫莲; traditional Chinese: 陳薈蓮; pinyin: Chén huilián) in 1986. Tan reportedly had a miscarriage during pregnancy and the two have no children. However, Chow Yun Fat has a goddaughter, Celine Ng, former child model for Chickeeduck and other various companies.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

  • The Bund (a.k.a. Shanghai Tan, Shanghai Beach) (1980) 25 episodes - a classic Shanghai godfather series [1]
  • Smiling Proud Wanderer (1984) - Chow Yun Fat's first and only foray in wuxia TV series.
  • Big River South North (a.k.a. The Killer 1)
  • Small and Alone In The World
  • Hotel and Hard Boiled
  • Family Change (a.k.a. A House Not A Home)
  • Powerful People (a.k.a. The Giants)
  • Vanity Fair
  • Ancient Battle (a.k.a. Conflicts)
  • Heavenly Rainbow (a.k.a. Over The Rainbow)
  • The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (a.k.a. Man In The Net)
  • Family Feelings (a.k.a. Brothers)
  • The Road Ahead (a.k.a. The Seekers)
  • The Shell Game II
  • Flaming Phoenix (a.k.a. The Fate)
  • Alligator Pool (a.k.a. Good Old Times)
  • The Maverick
  • The Legend of Master So
  • Radio Tycoon
  • Angels and Devils
  • The Yang's Saga
  • Big Hong Kong (a.k.a. Battle Among The Clans)
  • Police Cadet '85
  • The Superpower (a unique role for Chow, in which he played an extraterrestrial visiting Earth)

  1. ^ Thewest.com.au

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Awards
Preceded by
Danny Lee
for Law With Two Phases		 Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor
1985
for Hong Kong 1941		 Succeeded by
Ti Lung
for A Better Tomorrow
Preceded by
Kent Cheng
for Why Me?		 Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor
1987
for A Better Tomorrow		 Succeeded by
Chow Yun-Fat
for City on Fire
Preceded by
Ti Lung
for A Better Tomorrow		 Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor
1987
for An Autumn's Tale		 Succeeded by
Alex Man
for Dua Tau A
Preceded by
Chow Yun-Fat
for A Better Tomorrow		 Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor
1988
for City on Fire		 Succeeded by
Sammo Hung
for Seven Warriors
Preceded by
Sammo Hung
for Seven Warriors		 Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor
1990
for All About Ah Long		 Succeeded by
Leslie Cheung
for Days of Being Wild
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chow_Yun-Fat"
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.