Cheng Pei-Pei, a star of two of the most beloved kung fu movies of all time, “Come Drink With Me” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” died on July 17 at her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was 78.
Her representatives at Echelon Talent Management confirmed her death in a statement. She was diagnosed in 2019 with a neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s, they said.
Ms. Cheng was widely known as the “Queen of Swords” in 1960s Hong Kong for her graceful, steely performances in kung fu movies, showing off delicacy and self-control she had gained during girlhood training in ballet.
She first gained prominence as the lead star of “Come Drink With Me” (1966), directed by King Hu and produced by the Shaw Brothers Studio. That film “opened a new chapter in the history of Asian action movies,” thanks particularly to its “relatively realistic” style of hand-to-hand combat, the film critic Dave Kehr wrote in The New York Times in 2008.
Ms. Cheng played Golden Swallow, a radiant but terse young swordswoman — “female knight,” as the trailer put it — on a mission to rescue her brother, a government official, from a gang of eunuch bandits. She battles large groups of foes with calm physical composure but wide-open, intensely focused eyes.
“When I got a chance to act out fight scenes, I was happy to oblige,” Ms. Cheng told Time Out in 2015. “I’m actually a bit of a tomboy.”
The success of “Come Drink With Me” led to many more roles in movies put out by the Shaw Brothers, including “Golden Swallow,” a sequel. Somersaulting midair and attacking her opponents with a variety of weapons and household objects, she beat up scores of bad guys.
After retiring from movies and moving to the United States, Ms. Cheng made a midlife return to the career of her youth, most notably in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000). It borrowed many motifs from “Come Drink With Me”; in each movie, for example, Ms. Cheng’s character coolly evades darts and then throws them at her foes with pain-inducing accuracy.
This time, however, Ms. Cheng played a villain: Jade Fox, an embittered fighter and governess of a powerful young woman, Jen (Zhang Ziyi).
Unlike previous films of Ms. Cheng’s, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” became a major sensation worldwide.
“Love in Chinese and Western films are communicated differently,” she told Kung Fu magazine, “but fights are the same, and we can understand what they’re fighting about.”
Cheng Pei-Pei was born on Jan. 6, 1946, in Shanghai. Her father was a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party and was imprisoned for much of her youth. Her parents later divorced and her mother moved to Hong Kong, while she stayed behind in Shanghai. She focused on learning and teaching dance, and she watched films in her spare time.
In the early 1960s, she moved to Hong Kong and pursued a career in film while also performing Chinese opera. She soon signed a contract with Shaw Brothers and moved into Movietown, their lot, where actors lived in dormitories and earned monthly paychecks. Ms. Cheng had a two-bedroom apartment with her grandmother.
“We didn’t socialize outside, so we didn’t know how famous we were outside,” South China Morning Post quoted her saying in 2022.
She married in 1970 and moved with her husband to the United States. At his urging, she retired from film and attended business school at the University of California, Irvine. They later divorced.
They had four children, all actors: a son, Harry Yuan, and three daughters, Jennifer Yuan Martin, Marsha Yuan and Eugenia Yuan. Complete information about her survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Cheng resented it when she felt that directors were being protective of her. “I thought, ‘If a man can do it, so can I,’” she told Time Out.
She boasted about what she did when a martial arts choreographer misjudged what she would need to do to jump out a window. She wound up clipping a second-story window, kicking herself in the head, hitting the ground and passing out.
“I came to and asked, ‘Did we get the shot?’” Ms. Cheng recalled. “When they told me we did, I passed out again.”
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