Chow Yun-fat

The series, about the rise and fall of a gangster in 1930s Shanghai, was a hit throughout Asia and made Chow a star.

Although Chow continued his TV success, his goal was to become a film actor.

Chow Yun-fat SBS (born 18 May 1955), previously known as Donald Chow, is a Hong Kong actor.

Most of Chow's movies produced by Goldig Films under exclusive contract in the 1970s achieved high gross revenues of over HK$1million per movie.

It produced and distributed over 100 movies from 1972 to 1982.

Chow started his career in movies in 1976 with Goldig Films, the third largest film company at the time.

Chow was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to Chow Yung-wan, who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker, and Chan Lai-fong, who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer.

Chow grew up in a farming community on Lamma Island, in a house with no electricity.

He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets; in the afternoons, he went to work in the fields.

His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten.

At 17, Chow left school to help support the family by doing odd jobs including a bellboy, postman, camera salesman, and taxi driver.

After college, Chow responded to a newspaper advertisement, 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 in soap operas that were exported internationally.

He made his film debut in 1976 in various movies produced by Goldig Films, including Hot Blood.

Goldig Films was founded and self-funded by Gouw Hiap Kian, who was its chairman and managing director and employed other individuals as movie directors.

Chow appeared in the 1980 TV series The Bund on TVB.

However, his occasional ventures into low-budget films in the 1980s after ones by Goldig were disastrous.

These figures are higher than ones Chow acted in the early 1980s, including Modern Heroes (江湖檔案), Soul Ash (灰靈), The Bund (上海灘), The Bund Part 2 (上海灘續集).

He has collaborated with filmmaker John Woo in five Hong Kong action films: A Better Tomorrow (1986), A Better Tomorrow II (1987), The Killer (1989), Once a Thief (1991) and Hard Boiled (1992), and in the West for his roles as King Mongkut in Anna and the King (1999), Li Mu-bai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007).

He mainly plays in drama films and has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor in Taiwan.

Success finally came when he teamed up with film director John Woo in the 1986 gangster action-melodrama A Better Tomorrow, which swept the box offices in Asia and established Chow and Woo as megastars.

A Better Tomorrow won him his first Best Actor award at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

It was the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history at the time, and set a new 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' films, such as A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Prison on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire II (1991), The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow 3 (1990), Hard Boiled (1992) and City on Fire (1987), an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Chow may be best known for playing honorable tough guys, whether cops or criminals, but he has 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 was named Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awards.

He brought together his disparate personae in the 1989 film God of Gamblers, directed by the prolific Wong Jing, in which he was by turns a suave charmer, a broad comedian, and an action hero.

The film surprised many, became immensely popular, broke Hong Kong's all-time box office record, and spawned a series of gambling films as well as several comic sequels starring Andy Lau and Stephen Chow.

The often tough demeanour and youthful appearance of Chow's characters has earned him the nickname "Babyface Killer".

The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-Fat "the coolest actor in the world".

In the mid '90s, Chow moved to Hollywood in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to duplicate his success in Asia.

Goldig also invested in properties, including a cinema, and financial investments with substantial assets since the 1990s.

Chow was identified by Goldig to be an actor before he applied to TVB as a trainee.

Chow's first film contract was an exclusive acting contract with Goldig Films.

His first two films, The Replacement Killers (1998) and The Corruptor (1999), were box office failures.

In his next film Anna and the King (1999), Chow teamed up with Jodie Foster, but the film underperformed at the box office.

Chow accepted the role of Li Mu-bai in the (2000) film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It became a winner at both the international box office and the Oscars.

In 2003, Chow came back to Hollywood and starred in Bulletproof Monk.

In 2004, Chow made a surprise cameo in director Dayyan Eng's Chinese rom-com favourite Waiting Alone, it was the first time he was in a mainland Chinese film.

In 2006, he teamed up with Gong Li in the film Curse of the Golden Flower, directed by Zhang Yimou.