Chow’s luck began to change in the mid-’80s, when he won a Best Actor award from the Asian Pacific Film Festival and Taiwan’s prestigious Golden Horse for his performance in Leung Po-Chi’s Hong Kong 1941 (1984), a romantic drama set against the backdrop of World War II. Two years later, he had his true breakthrough when then-obscure director John Woo cast him as hitman Mark Gor in A Better Tomorrow, a hugely influential movie responsible for the birth of the Hong Kong gangster film genre. The character of Gor has remained one of Chow’s most popular to date, and made him — to say nothing of Woo — an instant star in Asia. The actor’s portrayal won him a prestigious Hong Kong Film Award, and Gor became something of an icon in the action genre, influencing such international directors as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
Chow would star in the two Better Tomorrow sequels, which followed in 1988 and 1989, but in the meantime he continued to prove his dramatic and comedic abilities in a number of other films. The same year that he starred in A Better Tomorrow, he played an orchestra conductor caught up in a seemingly eternal love affair in Dream Lovers, a fantasy romance directed by Tony Au. The following year, he won another Golden Horse as the romantic lead in An Autumn’s Tale and further turned on the charm in the romantic comedy My Will, I Will. However, 1987 proved that Chow’s greatest claim to fame on an international level was his status as an action star. That year, he caused a sensation in Hong Kong with his portrayal of a prison inmate in old friend Ringo Lam’s Prison on Fire. The film astonished audiences with both its excessive violence and bloodshed and the strength of the fraternal bond between Chow and Tony Leung Kar-Fai, who played a young inmate under Chow’s tutelage. Chow earned a Hong Kong Film Award nomination for his work in the film, and that same year he won the same award for his portrayal of an undercover cop in Lam’s City on Fire. A hugely influential film that was the inspiration for Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, City widened Chow’s American fan base and further cemented his status as one of Asia’s most bankable stars.
Further screen immortality was granted to Chow when he played a hitman trying to make good in Woo’s The Killer (1989). The film was a huge success and is widely viewed as the director’s stylistic masterpiece, a tribute to such directors as Kubrick, Peckinpah, and Scorsese and an inspiration to any number of international filmmakers. The following year, Chow was able to combine his prowess as an action star with his talent for comedy and romance in Woo’s Once a Thief, in which he, Leslie Cheung, and Cherie Chung played a trio of orphans who have grown up to be art thieves. The film was not nearly as violent as most of Woo’s movies tended to be, but Chow was back in full hard-man regalia for his next major outing, Lam’s Full Contact (1992). An extremely stylish action film, it starred the actor as a nightclub bouncer bent on revenge. As such, it was packed with the type of well-choreographed violence that had endeared him to audiences everywhere: one of the film’s highlights featured Chow single-handedly fighting off three machete-wielding gangsters with a three-inch butterfly knife.
The same year he starred in Full Contact, Chow also had one of his most celebrated collaborations with Woo, Hard-Boiled. Cast as a tough cop with a heart of gold who teams up with a precariously unstable undercover agent (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), Chow did his part to help amass one of the highest body counts in cinematic history, and in doing so, he further exhibited the kind of graceful will to destruction that had become his trademark. The film was Woo’s last before he departed for Hollywood, and was the inspiration for his terrifically successful Face/Off, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in variants of the Chow/Leung roles.