Stephen Chow
Stephen Chow Sing-chi is a Hong Kong filmmaker and former actor, known for his mo lei tau comedy, which has a significant influence on Chinese popular culture. His career began in television, where he gained recognition through variety shows and TV dramas. Chow's breakthrough came in 1989 with the comedy dramas The Final Combat and The Justice of Life, the latter marking the beginning of his on-screen collaboration with Ng Man-tat. He consecutively broke Hong Kong’s box office records in the next two years with films All for the Winner and Fight Back to School, cementing his status as one of the region's most popular comedic actors.
Since the early 1990s, Chow began working as a screenwriter and director, serving as a de facto director for Flirting Scholar before receiving his first directorial credit with From Beijing with Love. His first two attempts at Hong Kong–mainland co-productions, Flirting Scholar and A Chinese Odyssey '', received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office in both markets upon release. However, they gained popularity over time, and by the 2000s, A Chinese Odyssey had particularly elevated his status as a cultural icon in China.
In 2001, he directed and starred in Shaolin Soccer, which brought him international recognition, furthered by Kung Fu Hustle. His final on-screen performance was in CJ7, after which he transitioned fully to filmmaking, achieving great success with comedies such as Journey to the West and The Mermaid''.
Early life and education
Stephen Chow was born in Hong Kong on 22 June 1962 to Ling Po-yee, an alumna of Guangzhou Normal University, and Chow Yik-sheung, an immigrant from Ningbo, Zhejiang. Chow has an elder sister named Chow Man-kei and a younger sister named Chow Sing-ha. Chow's given name "Sing-chi" derives from Tang dynasty Chinese poet Wang Bo's essay Preface to the Prince of Teng's Pavilion. After his parents divorced when he was seven, Chow was raised by his mother. Chow attended Heep Woh Primary School, a missionary school attached to the Hong Kong Council of the Church of Christ in China in Prince Edward Road, Kowloon Peninsula. When he was nine, he saw Bruce Lee's film The Big Boss, which inspired him to become a martial arts star. Chow entered San Marino Secondary School, where he studied alongside Lee Kin-yan. After graduation, he joined the TVB's acting classes.Career
Chow began his career as an extra for Rediffusion Television. Around 1980 he applied for TVB's famous artist training course alongside his friend, Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Leung Chiu-wai won a place in the class, but Chow was rejected and became an office assistant for a shipping company, a job he describes as "so boring." A year later, his friend and neighbor, Jaime Chik Mei-jan, a veteran of the previous year's training course, put in a word for Chow and he was admitted to the 1982 training class.He captured the attention of the public as host of the TVB Jade children's program 430 Space Shuttle. He stayed with the show for five years. Producer and actor Danny Lee signed him to a two year contract with his company, Magnum Films, and cast him in a supporting role in the crime drama Final Justice, which won him the Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Horse Awards.
For the next two years, Chow capitalized on that success, working non-stop. He shot to further television stardom in the TVB wuxia series The Final Combat. In addition to shooting the 30 episodes of The Final Combat, he also appeared in 12 feature films during that same period, most of them triad movies, action films, or dramas. Jeff Lau directed him in the police thriller Thunder Cops II and remembered him in early 1990 when producer Ng See-yuen tried to capitalize on the success of the previous year's hit Chow Yun-fat vehicle God of Gamblers. Chow would not return to shoot a sequel and so, sensing a hole in the marketplace, Ng hired Jeff Lau to direct a parody. Remembering his work with Stephen Chow, Lau hired him to star, pairing him with Sharla Cheung and Ng Man-tat, a big star in the Seventies before a gambling addiction wrecked his career. He was then trying to make a comeback as a character actor.
All for the Winner became the highest grossing Hong Kong film of all time and the number one film for the year. Wong Jing hired Chow to star in the official sequels God of Gamblers II and God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai sequels which Wong wrote and directed. Lau had vowed never to work with Stephen Chow again after All for the Winner and so when it came time to make the sequel to that hit, Stephen Chow only appeared in a brief cameo.
After All for the Winner, Chow had two more major hits, God of Gamblers II and Tricky Brains, which grossed HK$40 million and HK$31 million respectively at the box office, but they were followed by what appeared to be a fall from grace as the sequel to All for the Winner, The Top Bet, under-performed at the local box office, and his next films Legend of the Dragon and Fist of Fury 1991 failed to crack the HK$25 million barrier. City Entertainment magazine reported that Chow's career was over and he was repeating himself after the hit that was All for the Winner. Win's Entertainment courted writer and director Gordon Chan to helm Chow's next project, Fight Back to School. Chan claims he was unsatisfied with the script and rewrote the film as an outline with 15 bullet points and the rest of the movie was improvised. The result was a movie that cast Chow in a heroic lead role and the result was HK$43 million at the local box office, a new franchise, and in what's considered a local benchmark of success, it represented the first time Chow unseated Jackie Chan from the number one spot at the Hong Kong box office.
Over the next decade, Chow appeared in more than 40 films. and wind up taking the number one spot at the box office eight times over the course of his career. Often, more than one of his movies would appear in the top ten, as in 1992 when all five of the top spots were held by Chow's films.
In 1994, Chow teamed up with director Lee Lik-chi and writer Vincent Kok for Love On Delivery, a movie that would only be the sixth highest-grossing movie of the year, a significant step down in status. Fortunately, Chow re-teamed with Kok and Lee again that same year for a James Bond parody he's credited as co-writing and co-directing, and From Beijing with Love became the number three movie at the annual box office, beaten only by Chow Yun-fat's return to the God of Gamblers franchise and Jackie Chan's return to the character of a young Wong Fei-hung in Drunken Master II, a character he'd last played in 1978 in the first Drunken Master.
Around this time, Chow established his own film production company, Choi Sing Company, and approached Jeff Lau about writing and directing his next movie. Lau told Chow that if he kept making the same movie over and over again he would never find popularity with female audiences and he needed to play a romantic lead. In a hotel meeting, he pitched Chow on filming a two-part adaptation of the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West, and Chow agreed. In order to shoot on Mainland locations the movie became a Mainland-Hong Kong co-production between Chow's Choi Sing Company and Xi'an Film Studios. The remote Xi'an Studios had always encouraged innovation and become home to China's celebrated wave of Fifth Generation arthouse directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige and they were reluctant to work with a commercial, Hong Kong production. However, recent cuts in government subsidies forced them to look for new sources of financing and they embraced the co-production model. The resulting shoot was chaotic, with the Hong Kong crew speaking only Cantonese and the Mainland crew speaking Mandarin. Actors like Lu Shuming and Wu Yujin said they had very little idea of what was going on and actor Law Kar-ying described Chow as "arrogant." The two films were titled A Chinese Odyssey Part One - Pandora's Box and A Chinese Odyssey Part Two - Cinderella and released in January and February, 1995 where they underperformed at the box office, leading to Choi Sing Film Company declaring bankruptcy. Chow, however, earned substantial money from the movie over the years through licensing and advertising opportunities and in the late '90s and early 2000s it became a cult favorite in the Mainland with phrases, expressions, and memes from the two films becoming a foundational part of early Chinese internet culture. This also became known in part as the Stephen Chow Phenomenon.
2001–2010: International stardom
In 2001, his film Shaolin Soccer grossed over US$50 million worldwide. Chow won Best Director and Best Actor at the 2002 Hong Kong Film Awards, and the film went on to garner additional awards including a Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bauhinia Award for Best Picture and Best Director. It was the highest-grossing Chinese film in Hong Kong at the time, grossing $46 million in the Asia region.In 2004, his film Kung Fu Hustle grossed over US$106 million worldwide. Chow also won Best Director at the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards and Best Picture of Imagine Film Festival as well as over twenty international awards. Comedian Bill Murray said that the film was "the supreme achievement of the modern age in terms of comedy".
His final role film CJ7 began filming in July 2006 in the eastern Chinese port of Ningbo. In August 2007, the film was given the title CJ7, a play on China's successful Shenzhou crewed space missions—Shenzhou 5 and Shenzhou 6.
For his work in comedy, he has received praise from notable institutions such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has called him the King of Comedy.