“After 56 years in the film industry, making more than 200 films, after so many broken bones, finally, this is mine,” Jackie Chan joyfully proclaimed at the annual Governors Awards where he was presented an Honorary Oscar Lifetime Achievement Award by Tom Hanks in 2016. Considered the heir to Buster Keaton, as well as to Bruce Lee, Chan is the first Chinese star to be honored by the Academy’s Governors for the cinematic legacy he has built for fans all over the world, the one star from the East that has received bona fide Hollywood stardom.

Comic actor, master choreographer, inventive stuntman and martial arts virtuoso, Chan, who was born in abject poverty to a cook and housemaid in Hong Kong in 1954, is a regular on the Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid actors, coming in No. 4 in 2019 earning $58 million (after Dwayne Johnson, Chris Hemsworth, and Robert Downey, Jr.), a year in which he didn’t have a Hollywood blockbuster.

He was given a Britannia award in 2019 for worldwide contributions to entertainment bestowed on him by Vin Diesel. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As a trained opera singer, he sang at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2006.  Chan is Dean of the Jackie Chan Film and Television Academy under the Wuhan Institute of Design and Sciences, has numerous awards from the American Choreographers Association, has been the inspiration for or participated in various video and arcade games such as Jackie Chan Stuntmaster and Jackie Chan Adventure, was part of the opening ceremonies of Hong Kong Disneyland in 2005, has a museum dedicated to him in Shanghai; and has an award named after him at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Jackie Chan Action Movie Awards. He is also a UNICEF Ambassador and a renowned philanthropist, setting up the Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation in 1988 for youth scholarships and disaster aid. He has pledged to donate half his estate to charity upon his death.

Chan’s business empire encompasses several film production companies, a clothing line, gyms, restaurants and food companies, a chain of movie theaters, a Segway dealership, and endorsements with Hanes, Visa and Pepsi just in the US.

The West discovered the actor formerly known as Chan Kong-sang (his original Chinese name) after he had already attained huge star status in Asia. After appearing in a few US movies like Cannonball Run that flopped in the 1980s, he returned to Hong Kong where he developed his signature humorous action star persona. Ten years after he left, he returned with the Hong Kong action comedy Rumble in the Bronx in 1995, which was released in a dubbed version in the US by New Line Cinema, and became one of the most profitable films of the year. Chan, who had injured his leg performing a stunt, shot most of the movie with the leg in a cast, using a colored sock to resemble the shoe on his other foot. He became a household name with the blockbuster Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon movies that followed. As of 2018, his movies have made over $5 billion at the international box office.

Chan set up the Jackie Chan Stunt Team to choreograph all his movie stunts in 1976; some team members were stuntmen who attended the Peking Opera School as Chan did, where training included martial arts, singing, acting, and acrobatics. The team does the stunts for other cast members in Chan’s films as well.

In his new 2015 memoir Never Grow Up (released in English in 2018), Chan talks about his first break in the business. He volunteered to do a dangerous jump from a balcony without a net after the stunt coordinator refused to allow anyone to do it. Needless to say, Chan pulled it off – twice – and never looked back. “I always perform my own stunts no matter how dangerous,” he says in the book, which also lists all the bones he’s broken in his career – nose, jaw, ankle, cranium. “My leg sometimes gets dislocated when I’m showering,” he writes. “I need my assistant to help me click it back in.” Outtakes in the end credits, which regularly include his injuries, are a staple of all his films.

Amazingly, the holder of the Guinness World Record for ‘Most Stunts by a Living Actor’ hates needles. “I’ve always been afraid of injections,” he writes in his memoir. “I have never feared for anything else except the syringe. Snakes, roaches, and rats can’t scare me, but I will be terrified by the sight of syringes. Imagine a needle in your flesh and a tube of liquid injected in your body… So scary!”

white’>For an uneducated kid who didn’t even know how to sign his own name on credit card receipts once overnight success and riches came to him, Chan is now said to be worth $350 million. He has received honorary doctorates from the Hong Kong Baptist University and the University of Cambodia, an honorary professorship from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Hong Kong, is a current faculty member of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he teaches tourism management. He speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, English, ASL, and some German, Korean, Japanese, Spanish and Thai.