In mid-March, Mr. Chan drew the attention of social network users to himself because of a bad photo from a meeting with fans: the actor looked changed, very pale. Social network users all over the world were not jokingly alarmed, began to regret the merciless time and wished the great Hong Kong actor health.
Here, willy-nilly, I had to remember that the ageless Jackie is already in his seventies, and time marks everyone in its own way – no one is immune from old age. Especially Mr. Chan, who lived his whole life simply without protection: due to his habit of doing all the stunts on his own in movies, even the most risk-averse companies have long refused to insure his life.
The actor says that there is not a single bone left in his body from the top of his head to the tips of his toes that has not been broken at least once.
He even found a way to turn the consequences of risky filming into an attraction: classic Chan films such as Armor of God usually kept audiences watching until the very last shot, as a sequence of failed – and deeply traumatic – stunts was then shown.
Due to his dizzying career as an actor and numerous injuries, it is somewhat forgotten that Mr. Chan is not only an actor, but also the kind of figure about whom they say “Renaissance Man”. Audiences all over the world know that he directs and produces his own films, but not everyone knows that Jackie himself composes and performs songs in them.
Mr. Chan has released 20 music CDs – he is a real star of Chinese pop music. And it is no coincidence that J. Chan was invited to perform at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in this role.
Everything in a person’s life, as you know, begins in childhood – hence Jackie’s habit of grabbing everything at once. When the boy was seven years old, his parents gave him to the Peking Opera troupe, whose members, in addition to singing, traditionally learn acrobatics and martial arts.
Chan was then called by his birth name Chan Kong-sang – “born in Hong Kong”.
After sending their son to study, the parents flew to Australia to work. J. Chan spent ten years at the opera school. There he mastered not only various arts, but also applied skills – for example, iron discipline.
Here he met Sammo Hung (72) and Yuen Biao (66), who later became his closest friends and partners. Thanks to Samm Hung, Mr. Chan also got on the set, where he starred in the classic Bruce Lee (1940-1973) films Enter the Dragon and Jing wu, among others. men”) in mass scenes.
National idol B. Lee was, of course, a role model for the young actor.
However, it was not possible to immediately start a career in cinema, so Mr. Chan went to live with his parents in Australia.
The young man got the name Jackie while working on a construction site in Canberra. After returning to Hong Kong, Mr. Chan once again went to the cinema and asked to film with the respected producer Lo Wei, who awarded Jackie with a new pseudonym Chen Yuen Long – “Already Dragon”.
During this period, in the early 1970s, Jackie starred in a few films in which she played a not-so-successful supporting role to B.Lee, which was plentiful in Hong Kong cinema at the time. This period includes Police Woman (Nu jing cha) and New Fist of Fury (Xin jing wu men), seasonal films that only Chan’s most loyal fans remember today.
The breakthrough came in 1978 when Jackie starred in two films directed by Yuen Woo-ping.
The Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (Se ying diu sau) and especially the Drunken Master (Jui kuen) eventually showed the young kung fu master the path to improvement. The mixture of martial talent, incredible hard work, personal charm and temperament exploded, catapulting Mr. Chan to the top of the national genre cinema.
Jackie said that he studied the works of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in detail – these actors became not only his idols, but also teachers of the profession. The narrow boundaries of the martial arts film were expanded by a unique sense of humor and witty elements added to the genre’s arsenal. Exactly how Jackie used B. Keaton’s legacy is the subject of extensive research today.
However, the point is probably not even the humor itself and not even the incredible endurance and courage. It’s just that Mr. Chan – knowingly or intuitively – found a completely logical path for Asian fight cinema, which went through a seemingly insurmountable crisis after B. Lee’s death.
B. Lee was more than a fighter, he became a mystical figure while still alive, whose every move was surrounded by an aura of the wonder of the human spirit. After his death, these qualities instantly acquired a legendary, mythological status, with which it was pointless, and unnecessary, to compete.
J. Chan brought a new type of hero to the screen – an agile, nimble, slightly funny guy who was easy for the audience to get along with. It is also important here that this image was suitable for almost any genre of film.
Sensing an individual trait, Jackie developed it in his directorial works “Project A”, “Police Story”, “Armor of God”. Gradually, Mr. Chan began to control all stages of production, becoming not only a director and actor, but also a stuntman, composer, cameraman. Already in the 1980s, Jackie Chan was not just a name, but a full-fledged full-cycle company with fabulous income. Charm, then and now, helps Jackie face the challenges of the new age.
Despite numerous (apparently well-founded) accusations of misogyny (misogyny is a morbid hatred of women) and a complicated relationship with his children, Mr. Chan remains a national hero, one of Hong Kong’s leading film stars.
Of course, for such an ambitious artist and shrewd businessman like Mr. Chan, being even a major Hong Kong movie star was too little. He began his attempts to conquer Hollywood in the 1980s, but the real victory was 1995’s “Unrest in the Bronx” (Hong faan kui). Director Stanley Tong managed to make a Hong Kong film in America, preserving all the characteristics of Asian cinema.
This film made Chan a star in the United States, so his next job was Rush Hour with Chris Tucker. While filming Brett Ratner’s film, Jackie still had a solid lack of English, so the traditional final sequence of failed stunts includes some of him getting his words mixed up.
From that moment on, Mr. Chan became a welcome guest in Hollywood, though, mostly in the rights of the main American hero’s partner.
Among the works of the Hollywood period – “Cowboy from Shanghai” (“Shanghai Noon”) and “Around the World in 80 Days” (“Around the World in 80 Days”).
However, the most important artistic victory should probably be considered less commercially successful “The Foreigner”. The film was directed by Martin Campbell, the director of “Casino Royale” (Casino Royale), who was able to reveal Jackie’s dramatic potential and turn his age changes into advantages.
Of course, Mr. Chan did not stop working at home either. The late Hong Kong period culminated in Operation Zodiac (Chinese Zodiace). With this film, Jackie entered the Guinness Book of Records for the second time as the actor with the most credits, in this case fifteen times. He previously held the record for the most stunts in a career for a more obvious reason.
Today, Jackie is still incredibly active. The action film “Hidden Strike” has just been released, in which J. Chan’s partner is the wrestler John Cena (46).
A sequel to The Karate Kid recently began filming, and Rush Hour IV is in talks. In addition, he voices films in America – one of the actor’s most recent works was Splinter in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And if we were to talk about the anxiety of the fans after the photos of an aged Jackie appeared on social networks, soon other photos from the same event appeared, in which J.Chan is cheerful and lively – the angle of photography works wonders.
Tags: appearance legendary actor scared fans
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