Jackie Chan childhood (young) pictures. Jackie Chan through the years.
Actor/director/producer Jackie Chan’s unique blend of impressive martial arts and screwball physical comedy has helped make him an international film star.
Synopsis
Jackie Chan was born Chan Kong-sang on April 7, 1954, in Hong Kong, China. He began studying martial arts, drama, acrobatics and singing at age 7. Once considered a likely successor to Bruce Lee in Hong Kong cinema, Chan instead developed his own style of martial arts blended with screwball physical comedy. He became a huge star throughout Asia and went on to have hits in the U.S. as well.
Early Life
Actor, director, producer. Born April 7, 1954, in Hong Kong, China. When his parents moved to Australia to find new jobs, the 7-year-old Chan was left behind to study at the Chinese Opera Research Institute, a Hong Kong boarding school. For the next 10 years, Chan studied martial arts, drama, acrobatics and singing, and was subjected to stringent discipline, including corporal punishment for poor performance. He appeared in his first film, the Cantonese feature Big and Little Wong Tin Bar (1962), when he was only 8, and went on to appear in a number of musical films.
Hollywood Star
In 1996, New Line Cinema and Golden Harvest jointly released Rumble in the Bronx, Chan’s fifth English-language (dubbed) release but his first hit in America. The film grossed $10 million in its first weekend, shooting to No. 1 at the box office, and its success prompted the American debuts of two previous Chan films, Crime Story and Drunken Master II.
After two less successful efforts, Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1997) and Mr. Nice Guy (1998), Chan scored another box-office hit with Rush Hour (also 1998), an American-produced action comedy. In Rush Hour, Chan employed his English-language skills as a Chinese police officer alongside a streetwise Los Angeles cop, played by the rising comedian Chris Tucker. In 2000, Chan starred in Shanghai Noon, another action comedy that was set in the Old West and co-starred Owen Wilson and Lucy Liu.
The following summer, Chan reteamed with Tucker for the sequel Rush Hour 2, for which the action star earned a hefty $15 million plus a percentage of the record-breaking box-office haul. In 2002, Chan co-starred with Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Tuxedo, a comedy about a taxi driver who receives special powers when he puts on his boss’s tux. That same year, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was honored with the Taurus Award for best action movie star at the World Stunt Awards.
Chan followed with another moderately successful sequel, Shanghai Knights (2003), but The Medallion (2003) and the adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days (2004) both flopped. Seeking greater financial and artistic control over his films, he co-founded JCE Movies Limited in 2004, through which he produced the successful Hong Kong flicks New Police Story (2004), The Myth (2005) and Rob-B-Hood (2006).
Recent Years
In 2007, Chan reprised a familiar role with the release of Rush Hour 3. In 2008, he provided the voice of Master Monkey for the wildly successful animated feature Kung Fu Panda, which went on to spawn multiple sequels, a video game and a TV series. That year, he also paired with fellow Chinese action star Jet Li in The Forbidden Kingdom. Subsequent U.S. releases had Chan appearing in such family-friendly fare as The Spy Next Door (2010) and a reboot of The Karate Kid (2010).
Meanwhile, Chan continued to thrive as a mainstay of Chinese cinema. He headlined the crime drama Shinjuku Incident in 2009, and wrote and starred in the action comedy Little Big Soldier in 2010. In 2011, he completed an ambitious project as co-director and star of the historical drama
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