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RIP to a legend in Asian cinema. I don't really want to bury this news in the Asian reviews thread so I think it's worthy of it's own thread. But, I understand that probably a lot of you don't really follow Asian cinema.

She's probably best known to American audiences for her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

This woman is a legend and had a long and amazing career.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0155607/


A fun fact, which a lot of you probably don't know. In the old CBS series, Martial Law, Kelly Hu's character was named "Pei Pei Chen" in honor of Cheng Pei-Pei. But, they later re-named her character "Grace Chen" in season 2 to make it easier for Western viewers.

I met Kelly in March and she autographed a photo for me and signed it "Kelly Hu (Pei Pei)"

Sad news. I always wished Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon focused on her character, Jade Fox, as I found her to be the most intriguing character in that movie. I can't deny that I was also thrilled to see her cameo in the Mulan remake by Disney.

Interestingly enough, Liu Yifei's character in The Forbidden Kingdom, Golden Sparrow, was originally named Golden Swallow as she was based on Cheng Pei-Pei's character from Come Drink With Me (and the title is a line Liu Yifei says in a critical moment in TFK). Sadly, the filmmakers changed the character's name for fear of inappropriate jokes by American audiences.

She was great. She was the leading swordswoman in Shaw Bros. martial arts adventures in the 1960s. She was in 23 films for them, but, with her dancing background, she also made musicals. Plus dramas. I just watched an interview with her from 2003 conducted by Frederic Ambroisine and included on the 2022 Blu-ray release of her seminal film, COME DRINK WITH ME (1966). The interview is 52 min. long, in English, and covers a lot of ground. Her daughters Marsha Yuen and Eugenia Yuan are actresses and have done Hollywood movies/TV shows.

From COME DRINK WITH ME:

I’m glad Ash chimed in about her ‘other’ films. I thought about mentioning them when DJARiya posted this news, but I figured it might not matter. But it kinda does. Her martial arts roles were obviously the majority of her work, but as noted, she branched out and these films are well worth seeing. I still believe these types of films would be worthy of small releases in the west, but only by a boutique distributor without major ‘exploitation’ vibes – so their buyers wouldn’t expect anything too ‘crazy’ – like maybe a 3- or 4-film set of non-martial Shaw films (and not necessarily Cheng Pei-pei) from the likes of Radiance or Metrograph or a label like that.

Anyway, here she is not kicking ass, just kicking heel (in Celestial’s dodgy ‘new’ trailers, unfortunately):



From OPERATION LIPSTICK (1967)

From BLUE SKIES (1967)

She only has a cameo in YOUNG LOVERS, along with a bunch of other Shaw stars of the day (though most of them aren’t in the trailer)

Would be cool if Arrow or 88 Films did a comprehensive box set with all of her work.

That would be sweet. Not counting her first ever role, which was basically as an extra, she did about 24 films for Shaw, the vast majority martial arts pictures. That’s probably too many for any boutique to stick out there all at once, though. And some are better than others, so they’d invariably cherry-pick. A lot of her stuff did come out on the old IVL discs in Hong Kong, but I believe a few were VCD only (maybe?) or relegated to the Ziieagle box. Still, we can dream. 🙂

Her career post-Shaw was so-so; a couple of Golden Harvest films, then gone for eight years, back for a couple of lesser Taiwan films in the early 80’s, then on to supporting roles through the next three-plus decades in a wide mix of films of varying quality, but some real gems.

There's probably 10 of her movies spread across volume 1 and 2 of Shout's Shaw collections.