stuntmen, cameramen and lighting guys, plus a group of super-keen youngsters striving to move up through the ranks. Jackie claims, with much justification, that there are far more injuries when you film with stuntmen unfamiliar to you. With your own team, it becomes “more like an art, like dancing”.

Now, after the illegal street-racing drama Dead Heat, came the final, and ultimately successful assault on America, with Rumble In The Bronx reaching Number One (Jackie would be closely followed by John Woo, with his Travolta-starring Broken Arrow). Here, directed by Stanley Tong and accompanied by HK pop superstar Anita Mui, Jackie would visit his uncle in New York, then have to kick his way out of a morass of biker gangs and police corruption.

Now widening his heroic characters and consciously making them more international, he reunited with Stanley Tong for First Strike, which saw him as a James Bond-like cop chasing a crim from Russia to Australia, trying out new stunts like hanging from a helicopter and skiing on one leg. He’d remain in Australia to film Mr Nice Guy with Sammo Hung, playing a Steven Seagal-style super-chef who helps out a TV reporter being threatened by drug lords. Next, Who Am I? was a return to Bond-ish action as, suffering from terrible amnesia, he battled dodgy CIA agents in Johannesburg and Rotterdam. The rooftop finale would yet again push back the boundaries of martial arts action.

After Rumble In the Bronx, the big leagues were beckoning, and Chan entered them with style by teaming up with Chris Tucker in the frenetic, hilarious Rush Hour – itself an Americanisation of his own brand of slapstick buddy movie. Here Jackie’s a legendary cop in Hong Kong who busts a smuggling ring only to have the masterminds escape to the US and kidnap the Chinese consul’s daughter. Chan comes to the States but his help is not welcome, so the LAPD pair him off with loudmouth renegade Tucker.Yes, it’s 48 Hrs again, but this time the taciturn Nick Nolte character is a martial arts master and a king of physical comedy. On a budget of $35 million, the movie took $141 million at the US box office, a major hit. Jackie had conquered Hollywood at last.

With American filming schedules now toning down his speed of output, 1999 saw him in the failed HK romance Gorgeous, where he played a millionaire businessman combatting a fierce rival and falling for young Qi Shu. Other than this there were only cameos in Stephen Chow’s brilliant The King Of Comedy, and Benny Chan’s HK police roustabout Gen-X Cops. His real focus was now in the US and it quickly brought more success with Shanghai Noon. Set in 1881, this saw Chinese princess Lucy Liu escaping a forced marriage by fleeing to America where she’s kidnapped and held to ransom. Jackie goes along with the rescue party and winds up in a hugely amusing partnership with Owen Wilson, a bank robber who talks and acts like a modern-day Californian surfer dude. The credits would, as so often happened with Chan movies, show a series of out-takes, mostly of Jackie cocking up or hurting himself. This would soon be the norm with US comedies, another way that Chan changed the face of film. Proof of his new-found status would now come with the hosting of Saturday Night Live and the delayed US release of 1994’s Drunken Master 2 which, made for $2 million, now took another $12 million.

He moved on to another of his Bond-like escapades in The Accidental Spy. Here he played a bored exercise equipment salesman who, having become a public hero for foiling a robbery, discovers he’s the long-lost son of a wealthy entrepreneur. However, daddy’s also a spy, and so Jackie decides to follow in his footsteps. It was typically silly but thrilling