Chow Yun fat

Chow Yunfat, SBS , previously known as Donald Chow, is a Hong Kong actor. He is best known in Asia for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the heroic bloodshedgenre films A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled and in the West for his roles as Li Mubai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean At Worlds End. He mainly plays in dramatic films and has won three Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actor and two Golden Horse Awards for Best Actor in Taiwan.

Chow was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker. Chow grew up in a farming community on Lamma Island, in a house with no electricity. He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka teapudding on the streets in the afternoons he went to work in the fields. His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. At seventeen, he left school to help support the family by doing odd jobs including bellboy, postman, camera salesman and taxi driver. His life started to change when he responded to a newspaper advertisement and his actortrainee application was accepted by TVB, the local television station. He signed a threeyear contract with the studio and made his acting debut. Chow became a heartthrob and a familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.

Source: Wikipedia