by JOHN VOLLAND
1 December 1997

HOLLYWOOD - According to his colleagues, his fans and even his detractors, Hong Kong-born-and-raised action star Chow Yun-Fat is more than just a movie star - he's a state of mind.

The 42-year-old gun-toting icon has personified coolness under fire and personal honor for as long as he's been one of the Hong Kong film industry's leading lights. That beginning point is arguable, basically depending on whether one is Chinese or not; what's inarguable is that, after starring in "A Better Tomorrow" for director John Woo in 1986, Chow's star has been on the ascendant. A handful of other films in Hong Kong helped cement Chow's place in Asian filmdom's pantheon ("The Killer" and "Hard-Boiled" with Woo; without him, "God of Gamblers").

But as Jackie Chan and many other lesser lights could attest, huge success outside the U.S. means little until one actually succeeds Stateside. Chow's first acid test in this regard is Columbia Pictures' "The Replacement Killers," which opens in February. Rarely does a U.S. studio so assiduously sculpt a film project around an untried non-American star, but that appears to be exactly the case with this film, co-starring Mira Sorvino and Jurgen Prochnow and directed by Antoine Fuqua.

That was quite a leap of faith for former Columbia production exec Teddy Zee, who brought the Terence Chang/John Woo production to his studio and zealously oversaw every aspect of its production. "Partially that's self-preservation, but for the most part it had to do with the immense belief I had that Chow really had star quality, something that I think is translatable," Zee says.

Given the opportunity to score Stateside - something the actor swears has never been a huge priority for him - Chow applied himself with his usual professionalism and high energy: He not only brushed up on his barely adequate English skills, he became admirably fluent; he not only got along fatuously with the sometimes explosive Sorvino, he also proved adept at negotiating the rocky shoals of Hollywood politicking.

"I didn't see any point in coming to America to reproduce what I did elsewhere," Chow told the South China Morning News earlier this year. "American film has its own culture, its own rhythm, in spite of how familiar it might seem. And it takes a lot of work to get it right, particularly for a non-American."

Such thoughtfulness is typical of Chow's approach, born of a rough-and-tumble boyhood on the Hong Kong neighbor island of Lamina. After a truncated education and several years' worth of odd jobs, in 1973 Chow had the fortune of being accepted into a young actors training program underwritten by the Hong Kong TV station TVB. After the series "Shanghai Beach" established him as a star in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, film roles became larger and more significant.

By the time he moved to L.A., after completing "Peace Hotel" for producer Woo in 1995, Chow had made more than 70 films.

"There are a lot of things left for me to do in films," Chow told the Vancouver Sun last year. "Shooting pistols and being impassive is not all there is. It is good that people enjoy those films where I do those things, but I'd like audiences to know that I am capable of a few other things."

Although "The Replacement Killers" and New Line Cinema's "The Corruptor" (with Mark Wahlberg) are very much in the traditional Chow mold, two other U.S. projects - a remake of "Anna and the King of Siam" and "King's Ransom," an action comedy reuniting Chow with his old friend Woo - seem likely to give Chow good chances to show the world what else he is capable of.

©1997 Cahners Publishing Company. All rights reserved.