Chow Yun-fat, SBS (born 18 May 1955), previously known as Donald Chow, is a Hong Kong actor best known in Asia for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the action heroic bloodshed-genre films A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled and in the West for his roles as Li Mu-bai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Sao Feng in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's 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. In 2014, Chow was the second-highest earning actor in Hong Kong, earning HK$170 million (US$21.9 million). Chow was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer and 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 tea-pudding on the streets; in the afternoons, he went to work in the fields. His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten. At 17, 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 after college when he responded to a newspaper advertisement, and his actor-trainee application was accepted by TVB, the local television station. He signed a three-year contract with the studio and made his acting debut. Chow became a heartthrob and familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally. Chow has been married twice; first was in 1983 to Candice Yu, an actress from Asia Television; the marriage lasted nine months. In 1986, Chow married Singaporean Jasmine Tan. The couple have no children, though Chow has a goddaughter, Celine Ng, a former child model for Chickeeduck, McDonald's, Toys'R'Us and other companies.

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