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Chow Yun-Fat (Traditional Chinese: 周潤發; Simplified Chinese: 周润发; pinyin: Zhōu Rùnfā) (born May 18, 1955 on Lamma Island, Hong Kong, China) is a Hong Kong actor. He is among a handful of internationally recognized screen actors that Hong Kong has produced, along with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Chow is not a martial artist. A tall (6'1 / 1.85 m), good-looking charismatic actor, he won Hong Kong's "best actor" award three times and Taiwan's two times. He has been compared to British actor Cary Grant and French actor Alain Delon.
Early life
CareerIt 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 Chow 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),The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow 3 (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992). Chow may be best known, especially in the West, for playing honourable 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 films such as Love in a Fallen City (1984) and An Autumn's Tale (1987). He brought together his disparate personas 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.
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..." He is set to play the demonic pirate, captain Sao Feng in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Private lifeChow Yun-Fat has married twice. First to Candice Yu (Chinese: 余安安; pinyin: Yú Ānan) in 1983, who was an actress from Asian Television Ltd, TVB's rival. But the marriage did not last long and the two broke up after about a year. Chow has since married Singaporean Jasmine Tan (Simplified Chinese: 陈萫莲; Traditional Chinese: 陳萫蓮; pinyin: Chén Xiànglián) in 1986. Tan reportedly had a miscarriage during pregnancy and the two have no children. Filmography
Selected TV series
See also
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