Chow Yun-Fat SBS (born May 18, 1955) is a Chinese actor.
Chow was born in Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked at a Shell Oil Company tanker. Of Hakka origins, he grew up in a farming community on Lamma Island in a house with no electricity. He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets and in the afternoons he went to work in the fields.
His 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 advertisement 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.
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 1930s 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 films 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.
The Los Angeles Times proclaimed Chow Yun-Fat "the coolest actor in the world." At that point, he had not even made a single American film, but he had already become an icon. Being one of the hottest screen commodities in Hong Kong, Chow moved to Hollywood in the mid-'90s 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. His next film Anna and the King (1999) did better, but the success was mostly credited to actress Jodie Foster. He 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.
On June 26, 2008 Chow released his first photo collection in Hong Kong, which included pictures taken on the sets of his films. Proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Sichuan earthquake victims. Published by Louis Vuitton, the book will be sold in Vuitton's Hong Kong and Paris stores.
Chow has married twice. First to Candice Yu in 1983, who was an actress from Asia Television Ltd, TVB's rival. But 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 Yun-Fat has a goddaughter, Celine Ng, former child model for Chickeeduck and other various companies.