Hung with wife Joyce Godenzi in 1998.
Sammo Hung was born on January 7, 1952, in Hong Kong, into a family tree weighted with film industry workers. When he was little, his mother would call him “Sanmao” – “a common way Shanghai people called their kids”, explains Hung.
It is often emphasised in his biographical note that his paternal grandparents were Hung Chung-ho, a prolific director in the 1930s and 40s, and Chin Tsi-ang, one of the first female action stars of Chinese-language cinema and an evergreen actress who continued to appear in films until the early 2000s (including in
Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love) – even though Hung didn’t have a chance to see them work when he was a child.
Instead, some of Hung’s earliest memories of filmmaking come from his maternal grandfather, a props designer who would take him along to film sets to help out on small tasks, and who, far more consequentially, would later send nine-year-old Sammo to Yu Jim-yuen’s Hong Kong-China Opera Institute to study Peking opera for the next seven years.
The change of scenery seemed like a good fit for the boy: he was struggling to complete his Primary 2 school year for the third time, while frequently getting into trouble on the streets. But Yu’s stern, disciplinarian approach to teaching and readiness to resort to a near-sadistic level of corporal punishment turned the wayward child’s life into a living hell.
As Hung and his fellow survivors would later say, it was an extremely common experience to have been beaten on the buttocks by their sifu, or master, with a rattan cane. When I ask Hung to describe the singlemost unforgettable aspect of his training days, he says that quite often, Yu would punish all the students when only one of them had done something bad.
In one episode, after Hung had run away from the school for three days and his fellow student Yuen Wah was caught secretly helping him, the latter was beaten 70 times with a cane, and became one of Hung’s best friends in life.
“I still have a scar on the top of my head from those days,” says Hung, before explaining how one of Yu’s exercises required his young protégés to hold a handstand for more than an hour.
When Hung was “13 or 14”, he says, with his “two feet leaning on a wall, I was standing with my two hands on a wooden bench for one and a half hours. It’s no joke, you know? At some point, I was completely exhausted. I fell down and my head hit the bench.
Blood came streaming down my face, and I remember thinking, ‘Why am I sweating so much? Is the weather that hot?’ But it was all blood.”
Hung made his acting debut under the name
Chu Yuen-lung in the 1961 film Education of Love. Meanwhile, he and his fellow apprentices – including Jackie Chan, Yuen Wah, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen Kwai and several others – would become renowned for their performances under the troupe name Seven Little Fortunes, which first came about when they were booked for a nightclub show.
Their stories from this time were most notably recounted in the 1988 biographical drama Painted Faces, directed by
Alex Law Kai-yui. Hung was invited by Law to play Yu, his sifu, in the leading role, and he won the second of his two best-actor prizes at the Hong Kong Film Awards for the part. (His previous was for 1982’s Carry on Pickpocket, which he also directed.)
Hung used to feel indignant at Yu’s approach but nowadays, he has only respect for his late master, apparent in his short film “Exercise”, which was included as part of the 2020 anthology feature Septet: The Story of Hong Kong. In it, the filmmaker cast his own son, Timmy Hung Tin-ming, to play Yu, and presented what can only be described as a rose-tinted view of his coming-of-age period.
“We have many stories – too many – from our training days,” says Hung. “It’s only after the fact that you could see the silver lining.”
Hung started working as a stuntman in films at the age of 14, and finished his apprenticeship under Yu and became a full-time performer at 16. The Shaw Brothers production The Golden
Sword (1969) marked his first credit as a martial arts choreographer, after Han Ying-chieh – Yu’s son-in-law and Hung’s mentor on his early film shoots – dropped out of the project.
Hung had the good fortune to meet King Hu, the visionary filmmaker, early. He was one of the children who sang chorus behind the scenes for Come Drink With Me, Hu’s 1966 wuxia classic, and, following Han’s