Early Life
Chow was born on Lamma Island, a tiny island off the coast of Hong Kong. His mother was a housewife, his father an oil rigger. He grew up in a farming community in a house with no electricity. Each morning he would help his mother sell dim sum on the streets and in the afternoons he went to work in the fields. His family moved to Kowloon, a town in Hong Kong, when he was ten years old.
At seventeen, he quit school to help support the family by doing odd jobs - bellboy, postman, camera salesman, taxi driver. His life started to change when he responded to a newspaper advert and his actor trainee application was accepted by a local television station. He signed a three-year contract with the studio and made his acting debut. With his striking good looks and easy-going style, Chow became a heartthrob and a familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.
Acting Career
It did not take long for Chow to become a household name in Hong Kong following his role in The Bund in 1980. The series was about the rise and fall of a gangster in 1930s Shanghai. 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. The film 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, such as A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Prison on Fire, Prison on Fire II, The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow III (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992).
Chow may be best known, especially in the West, for playing honorable 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 blockbusters such as Love in a Fallen City (1984) and An Autumn's Tale (1987). He brought together his disparate personae 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 became immensely popular, broke Hong Kong's all-time box office record and spawned a series of gambling movies.
The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-Fat 'the coolest actor in the world' before he had even made a single American film. Chow moved to Hollywood in the mid-1990s in an attempt to duplicate his success on an international scale. His first two films, The Replacement Killers (1998) and The Corruptor (1999), were box-office disappointments. Anna and the King (1999) did better, but the success was mostly credited to actress Jodie Foster.
Chow returned to Asia for the 2000 film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it became a winner at both the international box office and the Oscars. In 2004, he made a surprise cameo in the mainland Chinese indie-hit Waiting Alone. In 2006, he teamed up with Gong Li to star in Curse of the Golden Flower.
In 2007, Chow played the antagonist pirate captain Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. However, his character was censored in mainland China as it was thought to be a stereotyping and 'demonising' portrayal of the Chinese people. The censors also cut Chow's "Welcome to Singapore" line due to its suggestion that Singapore is a land of pirates.
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. When asked what if it never comes true, he replied: "I would just have to laugh about it."
Personal life
Chow has married twice, first in 1983 to Candice Yu, an actress from a rival television station. The marriage did not last long and the two broke up after nine months. Chow has since married Singaporean Jasmine Tan in 1986. Tan reportedly had a miscarriage during pregnancy and the two have no children. However, Chow has a goddaughter, Celine Ng, former child model for Chickeeduck and other companies.
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