Chow Yun-Fat (1955-…), is a Hong Kong-born television and motion-picture actor. He is best known to Western audiences for his roles in action films.
Chow Yun-Fat was born on May 18, 1955, on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. He moved with his family to urban Hong Kong in 1965.
In 1973, Chow began a training program that led to his acting in soap operas on Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), a commercial TV station in Hong Kong. His first lead role in a movie was in the romantic police drama Massage Girls (1976). Chow’s first critical success was in the action thriller The Story of Woo Viet (1981). In the early 1980’s, Chow became famous as a white-suited crime boss in the popular TVB series Shanghai Beach. He received several Asian acting awards for his role in the 1984 war drama Hong Kong 1941.
Chow has collaborated on several successful action films with the Chinese-born director John Woo, beginning with A Better Tomorrow (1986), and including A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987), The Killer (1989), and Hard Boiled (1992). The popularity of these films brought Chow to the United States, where he has acted in a number of Hollywood films, including The Replacement Killers (1998), The Corruptor (1999), and Anna and the King (1999). Chow won critical acclaim for his role as a warrior in the Academy Award-winning martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), directed by the Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee. Chow also starred as a Singapore pirate captain in the Hollywood blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007).
