Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). That same year, rumors that Chow had made a list of diva-like demands in order to appear in old cohort Woo’s The Battle of Red Cliff would seemingly be substantiated when the star suddenly dropped out of the troubled production. Later, when the smoke settled on the incident, Woo veteran Tony Leung Chiu-Wai stepped in to fill the role originally intended for his Hard-Boiled co-star as Chow announced that he would indeed appear in the film after all — ostensibly in a different role than the one Leung had replaced him in. Though all of the confusion surrounding the perplexing incident no doubt had fans wondering just what would become of the film that was set to reunite Woo and Chow for their first feature together in well over a decade, there was cause for celebration when it was announced that Strangehold — the oft-discussed video-game sequel to Woo’s 1992 action classic Hard-Boiled — would finally see the light of day in 2007, and that Chow himself would be reprising his role as trigger-happy Tequila for the Woo-directed third-person shooter. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide

Early life
He was born on the tiny offshore Hong Kong’s Lamma Island to a housewife mother and an oil rigger father. Of Hakka origins, Chow grew up in a farming community in a house with no electricity. He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell dim sum on the streets and in the afternoons he went to work in the fields. Chow’s family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. 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 ad and his actor-trainee application was accepted by TVB, the 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.

Career
It did not take long for Chow to become a household name in Hong Kong following his role in the hit series The Bund in 1980. The Bund, about the rise and fall of a gangster in 1930’s Shanghai, made him a superstar. 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. A Better Tomorrow won him 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, again teaming up with Woo, such as A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987), Prison on Fire, Prison on Fire II, The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow 3 (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