Jackie Chan

At seven years old, Chan Kong-sang was handed over by his parents to the China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera school in Hong Kong where children trained in martial arts, acrobatics and song from dawn until night, under a regime so harsh it would be illegal today. He stayed ten years. Out of that school came the Seven Little Fortunes performing troupe, lifelong friends Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, and the boy who would grow up to be Jackie Chan, the most famous stuntman alive.

Born in Hong Kong on 7 April 1954 to Charles and Lee-Lee Chan, refugees who worked as a cook and a housekeeper, he even owes his name to manual labour: during a stint on a Canberra building site in the seventies, where his parents had settled, a workmate called Jack nicknamed him Little Jack. It stuck, and Jackie was born.

Kung fu with a punchline

He started out taking punches as a stuntman for Bruce Lee in 'Fist of Fury' and Enter the Dragon, and after several failed attempts to market him as the next Lee, he tried the opposite: comedy. In 1978, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master invented the kung fu comedy and made him Asia's biggest star.

Through the eighties and nineties he directed and starred in a run of classics shot without doubles or safety nets: 'Project A', 'Police Story' with its legendary shopping centre plunge, 'Supercop' alongside Michelle Yeoh and 'Drunken Master II'. The end credits blooper reels of real, painful impacts became his trademark. The price was steep: filming 'Armour of God' in 1986 he missed a jump to a tree, cracked his skull on a rock and needed eight hours of emergency brain surgery. He still has a plate in his head and partial hearing loss in one ear.

Rush Hour and the conquest of Hollywood

America resisted him for two decades, then fell at once when 'Rumble in the Bronx' topped the US box office in 1996. Rush Hour (1998) paired him with Chris Tucker, became a global smash and spawned Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3, while the western spoof Shanghai Noon with Owen Wilson did the rest.

Later came a first meeting with Jet Li in The Forbidden Kingdom, the mentor role opposite Jaden Smith in the hit remake of The Karate Kid, voice work as Monkey in the Kung Fu Panda films and as Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and a straight dramatic turn that surprised critics in The Foreigner opposite Pierce Brosnan.

An Oscar, two Guinness records and no brakes

In November 2016 the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar. His acceptance line said it all: after 56 years and more than 200 films, "after so many bones, finally this is mine". He also holds two Guinness World Records, for the most stunts by a living actor and for the fifteen different jobs he performed on a single film, 'Chinese Zodiac'. In Asia he doubles as a Cantopop star with a stack of albums, and he's served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2004.

Past seventy, he shows no sign of slowing down: the stuntman tribute Ride On, Hidden Strike with John Cena, his return as Mr. Han alongside Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid: Legends and the thriller The Shadow's Edge, which ruled the Chinese box office for weeks in 2025 and passed 174 million dollars. He keeps publicly nudging the studio to hurry up with 'Rush Hour 4', now officially in the works but still undated.

He's guarded his private life fiercely since 1982, when he secretly married Taiwanese actress Joan Lin in Los Angeles. Their son, actor and singer Jaycee Chan, was born that December; a drugs arrest in Beijing in 2014 strained the family before father and son patched things up. Chan also has a daughter, Etta, from an affair in 1999, with whom he has no relationship.

Since 2012 he's been promising that each big action film will be his last. Then the next shoot comes along and there he is again, dangling off something tall. Nobody who has watched him for fifty years expects him to stop.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Jackie Chan is Enter the Dragon (1973); in all, 33 films over 52 years. They have worked as actor in 32, producer in 10, writer in 1 and composer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Kung Fu Panda (2008), with 90 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 16 titles. The person they have worked with most is Seth Rogen, on 4 films, among them Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2.