NEVER GROW UP book JACKIE CHAN WITH ZHU MO | Simon & SchuSter

twenty years on from his first autobiography (1998’s I Am Jackie Chan), the star of Rush Hour, Shanghai Knights and far too many Hong Kong actioners to name has another go in a memoir that’s surprisingly self-lacerating for a glossy celebrity tell-all.

The young Chan’s cold-hearted treatment of his first girlfriend (“I’ll call her Chang”) warrants an entire chapter,

while he readily admits he’s hardly been a model husband to his longsuffering wife Joan – a woman who’s barely seen him for the last 35 years and has also had to endure the humiliation of an extramarital affair that left him with an illegitimate daughter.

When not raking himself over the coals, though, Chan is more than happy to relive the films, stunts and injuries that have made him so beloved around the globe: the clock-tower free fall from Project A, for example, or the life-threatening tree tumble from Armour Of God that left him needing emergency brain surgery. His belated US stardom gets shorter shrift (there’s no mention of Kung Fu Panda), while we could have done without the obsequious sidebars, written by his co-author/publicist Mo, extolling his charity work and treatment of journalists.

For the most part, however, this is a highly readable overview of a long career that was rightly saluted with an honorary Oscar in 2016, a “Chantastic” episode its recipient says was “pure Hollywood magic”. Neil Smith