Cheng Pei-pei

Cheng Pei-pei (6 January 1946 – 17 July 2024) was a Hong Kong actress with international credits. She started her career in 1963 and was considered cinema's first female action hero. She was best known for King Hu's wuxia film Come Drink with Me (1966) and Ang Lee's wuxia film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

Career
Cheng was born in Shanghai, with her ancestral home in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. She was the eldest of four siblings, with a brother and two sisters. Her father, Jiang Xuecheng, was a KMT member who worked for the Shanghai Municipal Police in Shanghai International Settlement. After World War II, Jiang established China’s first ink factory. In 1952, when Cheng was 6, her father was labeled a counter-revolutionary and sent to a labor camp in Inner Mongolia; she never saw him again and he died in 1963 without his family knowing. Cheng's mother, who was initially her father's secretary and later his concubine, decided to change the children’s surname to her own to protect them from their father's political consequences.

Cheng attended World Elementary School in Shanghai, where she was a schoolmate of future movie stars Grace Chang and Chen Hou. She went to the Shanghai No. 3 Girls' High School, where she was a schoolmate of Lydia Shum. Cheng studied ballet for six years in Shanghai. In the mid-1950s, Cheng's mother and siblings moved to Hong Kong, leaving Cheng in the care of a nanny in Shanghai before the nanny also left. Cheng lived independently for several years and moved to Hong Kong in 1960, during her second year of junior high, to reunite with her family. In 1963, she was admitted to the training programme at Shaw Brothers Studio. After graduating she joined Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio in the same year and made her film debut in The Lotus Lamp (1965), playing the male scholar Liu Yanchang opposite Lin Dai. Cheng followed this with her first female lead role in the Taiwanese drama film Lovers' Rock (1964).

Due to her Mandarin skills and dance background, she quickly worked her way up in the industry. Cheng gained fame for starring in the Hong Kong wuxia film Come Drink with Me (1966), directed by King Hu. Set during the Ming Dynasty, it stars Cheng as Golden Swallow, a skilled swordswoman on a mission to rescue her brother. Cheng continued to play expert swordswomen in a number of films throughout the 1960s.

In 1970, at the peak of her career, Cheng married Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung. She subsequently retired from acting and moved to the United States for her husband's business endeavors. She attended business school at the University of California, Irvine and also taught Chinese dance in Southern California. In the 1980s, Cheng founded a television production company in the United States and traveled across Hawaii and Northern California at her own expense to produce a documentary series about Chinese Americans. Both Cheng's TV business and her marriage failed around the same time. In 1987, she divorced from Yuan but continued to live with him for two years. In 1989, her company declared bankruptcy, and Cheng moved out of their house.

With the comedy Flirting Scholar, Cheng successfully returned to acting in the 1990s Hong Kong. In 2000, she returned to international attention with her role as Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , directed by Ang Lee, whom Cheng had befriended in the 90s when she was host of KSCI's Mandarin talk show, Pei-Pei's Time.

Into the 21st century, she became active across Greater China with Chinese TV dramas such as Young Justice Bao (2000), Chinese Paladin (2004), and The Patriot Yue Fei (2012), as well as Singaporean TV dramas Spring of Life (2002) and Women of Times (2006). She gained new popularity among the younger generation with Chinese reality show Divas Hit the Road (2014). Her notable international credits included the action film Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009), the British drama Lilting (2014), the Canadian drama Meditation Park (2017), and Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan (2020).

Upon receiving a lifetime achievement award in Hong Kong in 2015, Cheng reflected on her acting career as follows: "I always remember that I represent the Hong Kong people. So no matter where I am in the world, I will always identify myself as a Hong Kong actress and maintain the professionalism that a Hong Kong actress should have."

Personal life and death
Cheng was Buddhist. She was fluent in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

In 1970, Cheng married Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung, whose father was the agent for Shaw Brothers in Taiwan. The couple met when Shaw Brothers' film Lover's Rock was being shot in Taiwan; Cheng's mother lost money playing mahjong at the Yuan family's home, and Cheng was sent to deliver the money to Yuan's mother, where Cheng first met Yuan. After their marriage, they moved to the United States. Considering Yuan was the only son in his family, Cheng felt obligated to bear a son for him. She experienced eight pregnancies and four miscarriages and had four children until a son was born. In 1987, with an alimony of $100,000, she divorced quietly without informing her children and continued to live with Yuan for two years before moving out.

Cheng's son Harry Yuan is a host on National Geographic, and her daughters Jennifer, Marsha, and Eugenia Yuan are all actresses.

In 2019, Cheng was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, but chose to keep the diagnosis private and spend her remaining time with her children and grandchildren. She died in the San Francisco Bay Area on 17 July 2024, at the age of 78.