Jackie Chan | Biography, Movies, & Facts (2024)

Jackie Chan (born April 7, 1954, Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong-born Chinese stuntman, actor, and director whose perilous acrobatic stunts and engaging physical humour made him an action-film star in Asia and helped to bring kung fu movies into the mainstream of American cinema.

Chan was born to impoverished parents in Hong Kong. The family moved to Canberra, Australia, when Chan was six, but the following year his parents sent him back to Hong Kong to attend a strict boarding school that trained students for jingxi. From age 7 to 17 he studied acrobatics, singing, martial arts, and mime—skills that launched him into a position with a professional tumbling troupe and landed him bit roles as a child actor and, later, as a stuntman. The independent film producer Lo Wei, hoping to find a successor to the late Bruce Lee, cast him in a series of lacklustre kung fu movies in 1976–78. Rather than ape Lee’s gritty persona, in 1978 Chan utilized his own form of bumbling physical comedy in his first successful films, She xing diao shou (Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow) and Zui quan (Drunken Master). He then wrote and directed as well as starred in Xiao quan guai zhao (1979; The Fearless Hyena).

Chan retained complete creative control for Shi di chu ma (1980; The Young Master), his debut with the production company Golden Harvest, which he subsequently helped transform into Hong Kong’s largest movie conglomerate. In the early 1980s, at the time when he was making an unsuccessful foray into English-language cinema, he moved beyond traditional martial arts period movies to modern action-adventure films, such as ‘A’ jihua (1983; Project A) and Jing cha gu shi (1985: Police Story), along with their sequels. The films showcased his directorial talent for fight and stunt choreography. His own stunts were often extraordinarily dangerous; he nearly perished from a fall in Lung hing foo dai (1986; Armour of God) that fractured his skull and impaired his hearing.

In the 1990s Chan finally broke through into the American market. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the cable network MTV in 1995, and the following year his blockbuster Hung fan kui (1995; Rumble in the Bronx) was released in the United States, along with some of his other classic Hong Kong titles. Chan starred alongside American comedian Chris Tucker in Rush Hour (1998), which enjoyed a great deal of success and launched two sequels (2001 and 2007).

Chan continued to work both within the Hollywood system (though he disliked the limitations it placed on actors) and in Hong Kong cinema. In the United States he appeared in such films as Shanghai Noon (2000), The Tuxedo (2002), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), and The Spy Next Door (2010). Chan starred in a remake of the 1984 action-drama The Karate Kid (2010) and later in the revenge thriller The Foreigner (2017). He did voice work in the computer-animated film Kung Fu Panda (2008) and its sequels (2011 and 2016); The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature (2017); and The LEGO Ninjago Movie (2017). His Chinese-language movies included Xin jing cha gu shi (2004; New Police Story); Bo bui gai wak (2006; Baby);Xinhai geming (2011; 1911), a historical drama in which he starred as Chinese revolutionary Huang Xing; Shen tan Pu Songling (2019; The Knight of Shadows: Between Yin and Yang); and Vanguard (2020). In 2016 Chan became the first Chinese actor to receive an honorary Academy Award, which recognized his “distinctive international career.”

In addition to acting, Chan pursued a career in the Hong Kong music industry, releasing a number of original albums beginning in 1984. He founded the Jackie Chan Charitable Organization in 1998, which, among other projects, offers scholarships to Hong Kong youths, and he worked as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.