The journey taken by Jackie Chan, now 61, from childhood poverty in Hong Kong to Dubai, where he is filming his 127th movie, is a script-worthy story of a small nobody who fought his way out of obscurity to become the biggest somebody in the world of martial-arts movies.
He was born Chan Kong-sang in 1954 in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, to parents Charles, a cook, and Lee-Lee Chan, a housekeeper.
His parents were poor, and by Chan’s own account, came close to offering to put him up for adoption by the doctor who delivered him. In the end, they borrowed the money to pay the bill.
Chan would have the benefit of his parents’ presence only until he was 7, when his father left to work in Australia, and the couple left their son behind. Much later, he would discover his mother had been an opium smuggler, while his father had also been a prominent gangland figure.
“I was shocked,” Chan said in 2014. “I thought he was just a cook.”
Abandonment proved to be a useful lesson in self-reliance. During the next decade, Chan would see his parents only rarely, but they had left him with two life-changing gifts.
The first was kung fu. Believing mastery of oriental fighting skills would teach his son “patience, strength and courage”, while he was still around, Charles Chan woke his young son early each morning to practise.
The second was a place at the China Drama Academy, which became Jackie’s home for 10 years from the age of 7.
The academy prepared boys for the Peking Opera, but in addition to singing and acting also taught martial arts and acrobatics. It was a tough life. Students “were severely disciplined and were beaten if they disobeyed or made mistakes,” recalls Chan’s official biography.
In an interview on British television in 2010, Chan revealed the routine he endured: up at 5am every morning for a long run while carrying two cups of water, which couldn’t be spilt on pain of a beating. Next, one hour of handstands, followed by intensive karate training.
“Was that fun?” he was asked.
“No,” he replied, with some feeling, “it was horrible.”
Chan had been at the school for just one year when, in 1962, he made his on-screen debut at the age of 8 in the Chinese film Big and Little Wong Tin Bar.
It was a prophetic role as Yuen Lau, a child who trains hard to break out of an ordinary existence to become a kung-fu hero.
At first, it seemed Chan would remain only a foot soldier in the army of stuntmen and extras that fed the Hong Kong film industry. Between 1963 and 1976, he churned out dozens of largely uncredited roles in largely forgettable films.
After 1973, a year in which he worked on 14 films, it looked like he had hit his high-water mark. The film industry was in decline, and jobs were suddenly so scarce that Chan joined his parents in Australia.
“I was so poor,” he recalled last year. “I was doing dangerous stunts for less than £1 [Dh6] a day.”
In Australia, working on building sites, he earned the nickname Jackie, bestowed by an Australian labourer who struggled to pronounce his real name, Kong-sang, which translates as “Born in Hong Kong”.
Chan hated the work and was “very unhappy in Australia”, but rescue was at hand. It was 1976, and Willie Chan, who had been impressed by Jackie’s stunt work, was recruiting talent for a movie being made by the Hong Kong director Lo Wei.
Lo had discovered the martial-arts sensation Bruce Lee, launching him onto the world stage in the 1972 film Fist of Fury. Lee died in 1973, at the age of 32, and now Lo was looking for someone to star in the "Bruceploitation" film New Fist of Fury.
It was the chance Chan needed. Trading on the leverage it gave him, he subsequently brought his own unique take to the genre, mixing humour with martial arts in such Chinese box-office hits as Snake in The Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978), in which he perfected his slapstick persona.
At first, Hollywood failed to get the joke, and after a series of casting calamities – including appearances in turkeys such as Battle Creek Brawl (1980) and The Cannonball Run (1981) – Chan spent the next decade making movies in Hong Kong.
In his home market, Chan could do no wrong. Long Cheung, his co-author on the 1998 autobiography I Am Jackie Chan, recalled visiting the star in Hong Kong during the former British colony 1997 reunification with China.
Chan was, recalled Cheung, “at the centre of everything – at the top of A-list guest lists, on every television and radio show, mobbed by journalists and gawking foreigners, wherever he went.”
But Chan was not only Hong Kong’s “most popular, and profitable, export” – he “was Hong Kong … the thrilling story of his life was also the story of how Hong Kong itself had pulled itself up by the heels to become a society with global clout and cultural influence.”
Inevitably, no amount of success at home could silence the call of Hollywood. In 1995, Chan finally achieved the Stateside breakthrough he longed for – the lead role in Rumble in the Bronx.
There wasn’t much comedy – Chan was presented as “the action hero who does all his own stunts” – but he was on his way to becoming a household name.
It was in 1998, when he was paired with the comedian Chris Tucker in the kung-fu comedy Rush Hour – "the fastest hands in the East meet the biggest mouth in the West" – that Chan finally found his feet.
His autobiography was published the same year. Chan, commented a review in Publishers Weekly, had "helped reinvent the Hong Kong action genre by blending hyperkinetic stunts with a self-deprecating humour and a freewheeling flamboyance reminiscent of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire".
Or, as one British newspaper put it last year, he had “found fame by falling over and beating people up”.
“I have a dilemma,” he said last year. “I love action, but I hate violence … I want my movies to have a message of peace, and helping each other.”
In 1982, he married the actor Lin Feng-jiao, with whom he had a son, Jaycee, the same year.
“Sometimes I won’t see my wife for months,” he said last year. “A good husband works, and for my work I have to travel. Caring about my family doesn’t necessarily mean sitting on the sofa next to my wife every day.”
Increasingly, Chan’s attention has turned to charity work, for which he’s well known in China, working to help children and the elderly, but it’s perhaps the plight of wildlife that preoccupies him the most, working with the charity WildAid to persuade his compatriots to abandon traditional “cure-alls” such as tiger bones and shark fins.
Chan has tried several times to break out of the kung-fu mould, with limited success. His role as Passepartout in the 2004 Jules Verne-reimagining Around the World in 80 Days was widely regarded as a trip not worth taking.
Dragon Blade, released in America last month, seems destined to be one of those sprawling ancient epics famed for sinking under the weight of its unintended comedy, generated largely by wilfully weird casting. Though a big hit in China, grossing US$120 million (Dh440.8m), the film has generated more belly-laughs than bucks at the American box office.
Chan, at least, emerges with his dignity – and, perhaps, his ambition to embrace more serious roles as age limits his physical abilities – intact. One critic, panning the rest of the cast, wrote that the “only person who did any decent acting was Jackie Chan”.
In Dubai, where he will be filming Kung Fu Yoga until October 30, Chan seems to be safely back in his action-adventure comedy comfort zone – and, in the process, on the cusp of cracking open the lucrative Bollywood market.
The film – a joint venture between two Chinese production companies and the US-Indian studio Viacom 18 – reunites him with the director Stanley Tong, who was behind Rumble in the Bronx.
Little is known about the plot, but it probably isn't too much of a spoiler to reveal that the film will feature several car chases. Whether playing it straight or for laughs, Chan hasn't had a major US box-office hit for years – but he probably doesn't have too many sleepless nights: in July, Forbes ranked him the second-highest-earning actor in the world, after Robert Downey Jr.
That’s thanks to a shrewd, deal-making grasp “of the fundamentals of the film business on both sides of the Pacific” and the fact he controls “enough brand extensions to make Jay Z jealous”, including a Segway dealership and a cinema chain.
That, concluded Forbes, adds up to a personal fortune of $350 million. Not bad for a poor boy from Hong Kong with nothing to his name but his fists and wits.
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