Connie Chan

Connie Chan Po-chu (, born 1 January 1947) is a Chinese actor who has made more than 230 films in a variety of genres, from traditional Cantonese opera and wuxia movies to contemporary youth musicals; action films to comedies; melodramas and romances. Owing to her popularity, she was dubbed "The Movie-Fan Princess". During the 1960s, Connie Chan was one of Hong Kong cinema's most beloved teen idols. Chan is one of at least nine siblings who were born to impoverished parents in Guangdong, China. To increase their children's chances of survival, Chan's birth parents gave away some of their youngest to other families. Chan was adopted by renowned Cantonese opera stars Chan Fei-nung and Kung Fan-hung. Her godfather is actor Cho Tat Wah. She has a son named Dexter Yeung, who stars in the 2008 TVB series Wasabi Mon Amour and Moonlight Resonance. Early life and career At the age of five-and-a-half, she started learning Cantonese opera from her adoptive parents, later becoming an apprentice of Peking opera master Fen Juhua, who was one of the first wuxia actresses in Shanghai during the 1920s. When Connie was nine, she began performing onstage. One year later, she and Leung Bo-chu – daughter of the great comic actor and opera clown Leung Sing-po – were the leading stars of the Double Chu Opera Troupe. In 1958, Connie made her film debut in the Cantonese opera Madam Chun Heung-lin. The following year, she played in two Mandarin-language productions for the MP&GI studio: as a widow's daughter in Yue Feng's melodrama For Better, For Worse, and as a young boy in Tao Qin's comedy The Scout Master. That same year, she also played the role of a filial son in Breaking the Coffin to Rescue Mother. During her teenage years, Connie appeared more and more frequently on the silver screen – at first, mostly in Cantonese operas, often with the legendary Master Yam Kim-fai, who had taken Connie as her beloved student; but later, almost exclusively in wuxia movies, usually in the company of veteran action stars Yu So Chow, Cho Tat Wah, and perennial bad guy Shih Kien. She also joined the Sin-Hok Kong-luen Film Company's stable of young stars – which included Suet Nei, Nancy Sit Ka-yin, and Kenneth Tsang Kong – and took part in director Chan Lit-ban's ground-breaking adaptations of Jin Yong's serialised novels The Golden Hairpin (1963–64) and The Snowflake Sword (1964).