AL-SHAREEF W.

EDDING III- SAMSON

JACKIE CHAN
Hong Kong's known actor, martial artist and stuntman - Jackie Chan is notorious for
being a one-man show. His unique blend of impressive martial arts and screwball physical
comedy has helped make him an international film star. Throughout the dozens of dangerous
stunt scenes the actor has had to film, Chan has performed almost all without the aid of a stunt
double. Chan has been training in Kung fu and Wing Chun. He has been acting since the 1960s
and has appeared in over 150 films.
Chan has received stars on the Hong Kong Avenue of Stars and the Hollywood Walk of
Fame. As a cultural icon, Chan has been referenced in various pop songs, cartoons, and video
games. An operatically trained vocalist, Chan is also a Cantopop and Mandopop star, having
released a number of albums and sung many of the theme songs for the films in which he has
starred. He is also a notable philanthropist. In 2015, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth
to be $350 million.

Stunts and screen persona

Chan has performed most of his own stunts throughout his film career, which are
choreographed by the Jackie Chan Stunt Team. He has stated in interviews that the primary
inspiration for his more comedic stunts were films such as The General directed by and
starring Buster Keaton, who was also known to perform his own stunts. Since its establishment
in 1983, Chan has used the team in all his subsequent films to make choreographing easier,
given his understanding of each member's abilities. Chan and his team undertake many of the
stunts performed by other characters in his films, shooting the scenes so that their faces are
obscured.
The dangerous nature of his stunts makes it difficult for Chan to get insurance,
especially in the United States, where his stunt work is contractually limited. Chan holds
the Guinness World Record for "Most Stunts by a Living Actor", which emphasizes "no
insurance company will underwrite Chan's productions in which he performs all his own
stunts".

Chan has been injured frequently when attempting stunts; many of them have been
shown as outtakes or as bloopers during the closing credits of his films. He came closest to
death filming Armour of God, when he fell from a tree and fractured his skull. Over the years,
Chan has dislocated his pelvis and also broken numerous parts of body including his fingers,
toes, nose, both cheekbones, hips, sternum, neck, ankle, and ribs. Promotional materials
for Rumble in the Bronx emphasized that Chan performed all of the stunts, and one version of
the movie poster even diagrammed his many injuries.

Chan created his screen persona as a response to the late Bruce Lee, and the numerous
imitators who appeared before and after Lee's death. In contrast to Lee's characters, who were
typically stern, morally upright heroes, Chan plays well-meaning, slightly foolish regular men
(often at the mercy of their friends, girlfriends or families) who always triumph in the end
despite the odds. Additionally, Chan has stated that he deliberately styles his movement to be
the opposite of Lee's: where Lee held his arms wide, Chan holds his tight to the body; where
Lee was loose and flowing, Chan is tight and choppy. Despite the success of the Rush
Hour series, Chan has stated that he is not a fan of it since he neither appreciates the action
scenes in the movie, nor understands American humour.
In the 2000s, the ageing Chan grew tired of being typecast as an action hero, prompting
him to act with more emotion in his latest films. In New Police Story, he portrayed a character
suffering from alcoholism and mourning his murdered colleagues. To further shed the image of
"nice guy", Chan played an anti-hero for the first time in Rob-B-Hood starring as Thongs, a
burglar with gambling problems. In 2009's Shinjuku Incident, a serious drama about unsavory
characters set in Tokyo, Chan plays a low-level gangster.

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.
Upon his graduation in 1971, Chan found work as an acrobat and a movie stuntman,
most notably in Fist of Fury (1972), starring Hong Kong's resident big-screen superstar, Bruce
Lee. For that film, he reportedly completed the highest fall in the history of the Chinese film
industry, earning the respectful notice of the formidable Lee, among others.
Big Break

After Lee's tragic, unexpected death in 1973, Chan was singled out as a likely successor
of his mantle as the king of Hong Kong cinema. To that end, he starred in a string of kung fu
movies with Lo Wei, a producer and director who had worked with Lee. Most were
unsuccessful, and the collaboration ended in the late 1970s. By that time, Chan had decided
that he wanted to break out of the Lee mold and create his own image. Blending his martial arts
abilities with impressive nervehe insisted on performing all of his own stuntsand a sense of
screwball physical comedy reminiscent of one of his idols, Buster Keaton, Chan found his own
formula for cinematic gold.
A year after the release of his first bona fide hit, Snake in the Eagles Shadow(1978),
Chan took the Hong Kong film world by storm with his first so-called "kung fu comedy," the
now-classic Drunken Master (1978). Subsequent hits such as The Fearless Hyena (1979), Half a
Loaf of Kung Fu (1980) and The Young Master (1980) confirmed Chan's star status; the latter

film marked his first with Golden Harvest, Lee's old production company and the leading film
studio in Hong Kong. Before long, Chan had become the highest-paid actor in Hong Kong and a
huge international star throughout Asia. He exerted total control over most of his films, often
taking charge of duties ranging from producing to directing to performing the theme songs.
In the early 1980s, Chan tried his luck in Hollywood, with little success. He starred in the
Golden Harvest-produced The Big Brawl (1980), which flopped. He also had small supporting
roles opposite Burt Reynolds in the ensemble comedy The Cannonball Run (1982) and its 1984
sequel.
Movie Empire

Back in Hong Kong, Chan's star continued to rise. He produced impressive action
comedies such as Project A (1983), Police Story (1985) and Armor of God (1986), as well as the
hit period film Mr. Canton and Lady Rose (1989), a clever remake of Frank Capra's 1961 film A
Pocketful of Miracles.
By that time, Chan was far more than a movie starhe was a one-man film industry. In
1986, he formed his own production company, Golden Way. He also founded a
modeling/casting agency, Jackie's Angels, in order to recruit talent for his films. Additionally,
after numerous stuntmen were injured during the filming of Police Story, the actor founded
the Jackie Chan Stuntmen Association, through which he personally trained and provided
medical coverage for its members. For his part, Chan claims to have broken every bone in his
body at least once while performing stunts. In 1986, during the filming of Armor of God, he
fractured his skull after falling more than 40 feet while attempting to jump from the top of a
building to a tree branch below.
In the early 1990s, Chan broadened his cinematic range, turning in a rare dramatic
performance in the melodramatic Crime Story (1993). He also made several sequels to his
hits Police Story and Drunken Master. Chan was still mostly unknown in the United States by
this point, but his profile experienced a meteoric rise during the mid-1990s, when a series of
events combined to bring him to the attention of a wider American audience.
Hollywood Star

In 1995, Chan created his own comic book character, the central figure in Jackie Chan's
Spartan X, a series that hit newsstands in both Asia and the U.S. That same year, newly
anointed directing sensation Quentin Tarantino, fresh off the success of Pulp Fiction (1994),
presented Chan with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Movie Awards (Tarantino
reportedly threatened to boycott the ceremony if Chan did not receive the award).

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 Americanproduced 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 boxoffice 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 1911.

CZ12 (2012) saw Chan back in action mode, and the following year he revisited his old
franchise with Police Story 2013. He enjoyed a huge box-office haul with the 2015 3-D historical
action film Dragon Blade, which also featured American stars John Cusack and Adrien Brody,
setting the table for a slate of 2016 flicks that included Skiptrace and Railroad Tigers.
Off Camera

Chan is a noted philanthropist whose causes include conservation, animal welfare and
disaster relief. In 2006, he announced that he would donate half of his assets to charity when
he dies. The movie star has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2004, and in 2015
he was named Singapore's first anti-drug ambassador.
In 1982, Chan married Taiwanese actress Lin Feng-jiao, also known as Joan Lin. They
have one son, actor and singer Jaycee. Chan also reportedly fathered a daughter through an
affair with a former Miss Asia.