When the Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-Fat "The Coolest Actor in the World," they were not only speaking for his fans in Asia, where his films have broken every boxoffice record. "Asia's greatest actor, he has become a hip invocation in Hollywood," the Times noted, "an insider's secret and an outsider's, too."

At that point Chow had not made a single American film, but he was already an icon to fans ranging from street punks to rap stars. Even filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino reportedly dressed like Chow's character in A Better Tomorrow --complete with duster, shades, and toothpick in mouth--for weeks after seeing the film. "More than just a movie star," Variety wrote, "he's a state of mind."

Searching for comparisons to introduce Chow to American audiences when he made his Hollywood debut in the hit actioner The Replacement Killers, the New York Times observed that he combines "the rakish charm of Clark Gable, the sensitivity of Montgomery Clift and the cool destructive power of Clint Eastwood." It is the combination of traits that makes Chow unique. "Chow is the Fred Astaire of action," explains Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino, who co-starred with him in The Replacement Killers. "Where Gene Kelly was the macho-type dancer, Fred was just as masculine but elegant. Chow Yun-Fat has that kind of elegance."

A winner of numerous acting awards, Chow is the only Hong Kong star who has made a career of versatility, being equally at home in action thrillers, slapstick comedies and tragic dramas. He is truly "The Hero With A Thousand Faces," whose popularity with his millions of fans worldwide derives from the intensity and inward quality he projects in even his toughest action roles.

"Somehow," wrote one critic, "even when he's pinning a victim to the table with a carving knife, he radiates soulful vulnerability." Despite his protean skills, Chow will forever be identified with the films of John Woo, who was finally able to create the unique mixture of poignant melodrama and brilliantly choreographed mayhem that has made him the world's leading action director. Chow became Woo's on-camera counterpart akin to what Toshiro Mifune was for Akira Kurosawa or what Alain Delon was for French gangster maestro Jean-Pierre Melville.

In Chow's work with Woo and directors like Ringo Lam (City on Fire), Tsui Hark (Love and Death in Saigon) and Wong Jing (The God of Gamblers), he defined Hong Kong noir and created his own version of the Gangster-As-Tragic-Hero, incarnated in America by James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. He also inspired a generation of young men all over the world to imitate his style of unbeatable cool. It was these roles that moved Time's Richard Corliss to proclaim that when it comes to movie heroes, "There's tough, there's tougher, and there's Chow Yun-Fat.

The son of two farm workers, Chow Yun-Fat grew up in a farming community in a house with no electricity. As a child he was given the nickname Gai Tsai ("Little Dog") by travelers to whom his mother, assisted by her son, sold dim-sum early in the morning before going to work in the fields. When Chow was ten the family moved to Kowloon City, Hong Kong, a crowded city-within-a-city that is connected to the Chinese mainland. His father worked for Shell Oil Company as a tanker seaman and was rarely home; his mother did housework. Chow briefly attended a Maoist school, but when he became involved in Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1967, his mother switched him to a more conservative school, which he had to quit at age seventeen to help support the family by doing odd jobs: courier, bellboy, door-to-door camera salesman, taxi driver. That is why he says of his fans today: "I think when people look at me they see themselves. If I'm playing a cab driver, I'm the real thing."

He entered show business when a friend suggested he audition for a place at the school for television actors run by TVB, Hong Kong's biggest TV studio. He was called back two weeks later, paid a $35 fee and began a course of training that included modern and Chinese dance, ballet, acting and kung-fu. His studies done, he won a contract that lasted fourteen years, appearing in over a thousand hours of sitcoms and drama series. His roles as aÊyoung hunk in 128 episodes of "Hotel" starting in 1976 and a Ô30s Shanghai gangster in "Shanghai Bound" starting in 1980, made him a household name.

His attempts at a movie career began to pay off (after a certain number of films with titles like Fractured Follies and Learned Bride Thrice Fools Bridegroom) in 1985, when he won the Best Actor Award at the the Asian Pacific Film Festival, and Taiwan's Golden Horse Award for his performance in Leong Po-Chie's drama Hong Kong, 1941. The next year John Woo cast him in A Better Tomorrow, over the objections of the studio who thought Chow was wrong for a gangster melodrama in the tradition of Sergio Leone. "I was looking for a modern knight," says Woo, who showed Chow Alain Delon's impassive and elegantly costumed performance in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai before the start of shooting. "Hong Kong needed a new kind of hero. They needed to see somebody who was about friendship and family and honor, and in his real life Chow Yun-Fat stood for all these things." It also didn't hurt that he looked great with a blazing Baretta in each hand. A Better Tomorrow took in 35 million Hong Kong dollars in that city alone and won Chow his first Best Actor Award at the Hong Kong Academy Awards. His character, who goes down in a storm of bullets at the end, proved so popular that Chow ended up playing the character's twin brother in the Woo-directed sequel A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987) and showing fans how he acquired his prowess with a gun in the 1989 prequel A Better Tomorrow 3 (also known as Love and Death in Saigon), directed by the first film's producer, Tsui Hark.

The genre Woo and Chow had launched, which substituted guns for kung-fu in modern versions of ancient Chinese stories of violent morality, gave new life to Hong Kong's action cinema and defined a new kind of hero for the `80s and `90s. "John Woo always created characters for me that were between a good guy and a bad guy," says Chow. "The bad guy with a good heart -- it's the key to dramatic motion." The typical Chow hero, an American critic has written, "lives between crime and the law, finds values there -- friendship, loyalty, redemption -- and dies for them." Chow and Woo continued their collaboration in The Killer (1989), where Chow plays a hit man who accidentally blinds an innocent young woman during a nightclub slaying; the caper comedy Once A Thief (1991), and Woo's phenomenal farewell to Hong Kong, 1992's Hard Boiled, which ends memorably with Chow shooting his way out of a burning building with a gun in one hand and a baby in the other. Another key collaborator has been Ringo Lam, whose first film with Chow, City on Fire (1987), won the star his second Best Actor Award at the Hong Kong Oscars, inspired Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and led to three subsequent Chow-Lam collaborations: Wild Search, a Hong Kong-style Witness with Chow in the Harrison Ford role; Prison on Fire, which launched the career of Tony Leung; and Full Contact (1992), in which Chow, sporting a Billy Idol buzz-cut, goes after a psychotic killer played by Simon Yam. Other Chow hits include Wong Jing's God of Gamblers (1990), an improbable mixture of Hong Kong action-comedy with Rain Man, and its 1991 sequel; the supernatural actioner Witch from Nepal (1987); the slapstick comedy Eighth Happiness, which became Hong Kong's number-one grosser for 1988; the cop thriller Tiger on the Beat (1990), and the farcical Treasure Hunt (1994), which has been announced for a Hollywood remake starring Chow. Throughout a career that already spans seventy films, Chow has always welcomed the opportunity to play in quality dramas, including 1986's Love Unto Waste, the feature debut of internationally acclaimed director Stanley Kwan; Mable Chen's (sic) tragicomic An Autumn's Tale (1987), and Johnny To's All About Ah Long, which won Chow his third Hong Kong Oscar in 1989. In 1993, Chow allowed his last long-term contract in the Hong Kong film industry to lapse.

His last Chinese-language film to date was 1995's Peace Hotel, produced by John Woo and underwritten by the government of Mainland China, where Chow is also a huge star. He followed that with his acclaimed American debut in The Replacement Killers opposite Mira Sorvino, playing John Lee, a former elite assassin from Beijing who decides to go straight when he is ordered to kill a child. News stories at the time reported that Chow did 50% of his own stunts over strenuous objections from the studio, and broke his Hong Kong record for the most rounds fired in a single scene (300 in Hard Boiled) by firing 500 under the able direction of Antoine Fuqua. Chow now divides his time between Hollywood and Kowloon City, where he says he will always live. When in Kowloon, he still goes to the market in the morning to buy fish and vegetables which he cooks for his mother. He is recognized but never bothered by fans during these expeditions. "They treat me like a friend," he says, "never like a movie star," and that's how he sees himself. "It's a normal job," he told US Magazine. "I'm a normal guy."

With The Corruptor, his second English-language film, set to open in February, Chow is looking forward to fresh acting challenges. "There are lots of things left for me to do in films," he says. "Shooting pistols and looking impassive is not all there is." Announced as his next project: a non-musical version of Anna and the King of Siam co-starring Jodie Foster and directed by Andy Tennant -- with a little bit of action for his faithful fans.

©1998 New Line Cinema. All rights reserved.