by RICHARD CORLISS
Time International
6 May 1996 Volume 147, No. 19

After a decade of superstardom in Hong Kong, Chow Yun-Fat is blasting his way into Hollywood.

Actors love props, and Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat has a dozen of them. Onscreen, just before he blasts some rat-faced malefactor into the next life, Asia's post-modernist hero savors a little oral gratification. In his 1986 breakthrough film, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, he went through toothpicks like a termite. In the 1989 box-office smash God of Gamblers, he munched on chocolates. Half his other movies show him chain-smoking; he keeps three cigarettes going at once in his most recent melodrama, Peace Hotel. But today, half a world away from Hong Kong--at Hollywood's Ivy restaurant, where the cinema chic meet to speak--Chow is playing with his napkin. Because he is a star in any language, he makes a simple gesture pregnant with meaning and suspense. What would Chow Yun-fat do with a napkin? Well, Chow the tough-as-titanium gunman, in a megadeath special like Woo's The Killer, might lift the cloth to reveal a Beretta and start blasting away. Chow the farceur, in a slapstick comedy like Eighth Happiness, might fumble frantically to keep it on the table. And Chow the bold dramatic actor, in a social epic like Ann Hui's The Story of Woo Viet, might use it to dab a tear from one corner of his hypnotic eyes.

But it's only lunchtime in L.A.; no life is at stake. And so, while chatting about his career, he effortlessly folds the linen into a piece of impromptu origami. It could be a flower, a snowflake, perhaps an abstract objet d'art. Like Chow's screen persona, the napkin assumes multiple forms and shadows, complexity and simplicity in one sleek package. For a decade or so, Asian fans have bought this package, making Chow, 40, the top dramatic star on the Pacific Rim. His influence in the 1980s was so immense that Taiwanese distributors once asked a Hong Kong director if there was a role in a film for Chow Yun-fat, and if there wasn't, they requested that one be written in before they'd commit to a deal. When at home, Chow attracts mobs of polite fans. "People treat me like an older brother or a next-door neighbor," he says. "When I go out, they don't go crazy. They just shake hands and sometimes ask for an autograph. I don't need bodyguards with me. It's not like Michael Jackson."

You don't hear about Hollywood producers lining up to sign Jackson to a big movie contract. But that's what's happening to Chow, and for a whole lot of reasons. Ticket sales in his hometown are flat, but the international appetite for U.S. films is ravenous. In the past few years, American movies have even overtaken homegrown product in Hong Kong, one of the few world markets with a financially potent national cinema. How better to strengthen that hold than to import the colony's best talent, as Hollywood did with Australia a decade ago? Hong Kong filmmakers have already proved they can make it in the U.S. On one weekend this February, the No. 1 film at the North American box office was fellow action star Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx, and No. 2 was Woo's Broken Arrow. Several top Hong Kong action directors, including frequent Chow collaborator Ringo Lam, are planning Hollywood films. Why not Chow? Following the trail trod recently by Chan, Chow is already a cult idol in the U.S. Last week he appeared at the opening in New York City of a three-week retrospective of 14 of his films. His impact has been narrow but deep. For example, director Quentin Tarantino has described how, after seeing A Better Tomorrow back in the '80s, he bought the same shades and black duster worn by Chow's character and pretended to be a cool hit man instead of the nerdy video-store clerk Tarantino was at the time. (The American director's 1992 debut film, Reservoir Dogs, was inspired in part by Lam's 1987 City on Fire, starring--you guessed it--Chow Yun-fat.)

Now Tarantino is a movie eminence. The betting in moguls' offices is that Chow could have a similar impact. He is poised to be the U.S. industry's first Asian romantic star since Japan's Sessue Hayakawa was a Hollywood heartthrob 80 years ago in such silent films as The Typhoon and The Cheat. Disney, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, New Line and other studios are developing projects for the suave, steely man from Hong Kong.

On the agenda: Replacement Killers (Chow as an assassin who is hired for one last job but goes on the run with a woman forger); Anna and the King (a remake, possibly with Emma Thompson, of the 1956 film that inspired the musical The King and I); Band of Assassins (written for Chow by Boyz N the Hood auteur John Singleton); Metal Machine (a futuristic road movie); Rush Hour (a Speed-like killer-bus thriller); and, potentially best of all, an action movie Woo would direct, about an undercover cop. Woo and Chow just recently dreamed up the story line.

It's a long way from developing a project to opening a movie. Some people wonder what lure the words Chow Yun-fat could have on a movie marquee in Dallas or Denver. But director Oliver Stone, whose company is preparing yet another Chow project, a police drama called The Corruptor, thinks there's a chance that Hong Kong's coolest star could become Hollywood's newest. "Our industry is more ethnic now, more independent, so there's a possibility. And Chow has great potential. He has a handsome face, he's tall and striking, and he conveys ambivalence. He plays the role of a Clint Eastwood type, a figure who walks down the middle. You don't know if he's the cop, the undercover guy or the bad guy--but he's always a good guy in the end."

Of course there's a difference. Eastwood has that surgically implanted scowl and a stubbly soul; Chow's look is smooth, glazed, harder to read and thus to type-cast. Yet, in his Asian action films at least, Chow is the man. The armor of masculinity around his screen persona is so secure, so dominant that in some of his movies he is not only the sternest man but the only unadulterated one. Other male actors, like Leslie Cheung in A Better Tomorrow, take the traditional "girl role": the sensitive, idealistic, whiny one for whom the real man must suffer or die. Typically, Chow will save the softer good guy, saving the hope of civilization with him, and then take out the brute villain. He's the Old Testament God, using heavy artillery instead of plagues and floods to keep the humans in line.

There's tough, there's tougher, and then there's Chow Yun-fat. He shimmies down banisters or ladders, gigantic guns blazing. In Lam's 1992 Full Contact, so violent it plays like a 96-min. Bosnia, Chow sends a villain to his doom with the terse "Masturbate in hell!" Even in something lighthearted, like Woo's 1991 art-heist caper Once a Thief, our wheelchair-bound star gets shot in both legs, and three times in the chest, by his evil foster-father; that gets Chow mad, and he kung-fu's the guy into a stupor. In The Killer, his legs are blown off; on his knees and near dead, he keeps on shooting. Like Garbo, Chow has often died at the final fade-out. But a movie star's career is the purest, surest form of reincarnation. Killed in A Better Tomorrow, Chow turned up in the sequel--as his identical twin.

What gives Chow a shot at Western stardom is that he's not just red meat. For his admirers, Chow is caviar. He has range; he can play coquettish and cynical in the same film, scene or sentence. His blindingly white teeth, his helmet of slick black hair, his suave smile in the face of carnage--all these make Chowmania a benign international epidemic shared by moviegoers of both sexes. Already he is a favorite of America's online cinephiles. Scan the Internet's World Wide Web, and find this ode by a female cyberfan: "He's debonair. He never wrinkles his linen suits. Ever the height of chic, Chow is equally swoonable in blood-stained cop khakis and pale Armani silks. Let's not forget that two-fisted gunslinging badass action! Who else but Chow Yun-fat could save a hospital ward from ruthless terrorists with such affable charm and impeccable taste in shoes?"

She refers to the 1992 Chow-Woo bullet ballet Hard-Boiled, which ends in a maternity ward that a vicious gang has just torched. (Flames engulf a dozen or more of the 70 or so films the star has made--if there's fire in a crowded theater, it must be onscreen during a Chow Yun-fat melodrama.) This time, our hero must escape from a maternity ward in flames while carrying a newborn baby under one arm. He survives but, for once, not without help: when his pants catch fire, the infant promptly urinates, thus dousing the conflagration. Fortunately, Chow's shoes don't get wet.

Chow doesn't do all his own stunts, a la Jackie Chan, but he's a game player. "There was a shot in Hard-Boiled," Woo recalls, "when I needed him holding the dummy baby and running through a corridor while eight or nine explosions blew up behind him. I wanted the real reaction from him, so I couldn't use a stunt double. And I didn't let him know the timing when things blew up. There was a scary moment when I needed a reaction, and I cued the explosion, and it really scared him. But he did it with no complaints." Gentleman Chow is not one to complain, but he will elaborate. "John likes all the gunfire and the sounds," he says with a soft giggle. "I don't 100% hate it, but sometimes I'm very scared." A disarming answer, and we suspect that Chow has been ingratiating folks since he was child on Lamma, a quiet island populated by fishermen and farmers. "Actually, I'm a country boy," he says. "I came from a poor family and worked for my mother on the farm." His first exposure to films came when Chinese Peking Opera movies were shown at festivals on Lamma. Then, when he was 12, the family moved to nearby Hong Kong Island, where the boy saw his first real movie dramas. "When I first walked into the cinema and saw the pictures--a Cantonese black-and-white movie--I thought it was amazing." He became what he still is: "a 100% movie fan," preferring World War II adventures and later epics like The Godfather.

Chow worked at odd jobs until his late teens. In 1973 he answered a newspaper ad for young actors and began interning at television station tvb. "And for the next 14 years," he says, "I did over 1,000 TV series, mostly soap operas and dramas." There was no time to learn technical aspects of the art, such as Method acting. Mostly it was learn the lines, get in front of the camera and act. His movie debut came playing a Vietnamese refugee in The Story of Woo Viet, but he was no hot property--neither was Woo--when they met and made A Better Tomorrow. Woo says he was impressed not so much by Chow's roles as by the actor's charity work with orphans. It showed Woo that Chow was "a strong man with a good heart."

That reputation trailed him to Hollywood. As Oliver Stone notes, "Chow is a very honest and virtuous fellow, married to the same woman for a dozen or so years." His wife Jasmine is with him in California, but they will not give up their Hong Kong home or residency--partly because the tax rate there tops out at 15%. "I like to make money," Chow says, smiling. "I just don't like to spend it." But Hollywood is revving up to spend money on Chow. He declares himself "excited about the prospects. You work with different people, and you get to speak in different dialects." At the moment he's looking for a dialogue coach to polish what he calls "my American English." With more than half his life invested in acting, Chow is ready for the challenge. "It's one of my dreams, you know. All the actors in the world want to be a star in Hollywood."

Right now, nearly all Hollywood wants Chow to be a star. If it happens, he is likely to take it as coolly as the movie characters he has incarnated and immortalized. And if not, we can't see him working up a sweat. Say "Chow" in another language, and it means both hello and goodbye.

©1996 Time International. All rights reserved.