Jackie Chan has broken box office records and just about every bone in his body, and now he’s broken through the long-lasting stigma against martial arts cinema. The star of the classic kung fu comedies The Legend of Drunken Master, Project A and Police Story has just been declared a recipient of one of this year’s Governors Awards, the honorary Academy Awards bestowed every year to cinema’s greatest trailblazers.
Jackie Chan began his career as a child actor in the 1960s before becoming a stuntman in several Bruce Lee films, including Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon. His breakthrough film as a leading man, Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, was also the directorial debut of legendary martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). Over the course of his career he helped pioneer the kung fu comedy genre, and transformed his adulation of silent film stars like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd into a stunt-based storytelling style that placed Jackie Chan in life-threatening danger on many of his most famous productions, resulting in notorious outtakes sequences that included real life footage of Jackie Chan breaking bones and succumbing other serious injuries.
Jackie Chan’s fellow Governors Awards honorees come from very different aspects of the motion picture industry:
Frederick Wiseman is widely regarded as one of the great documentary filmmakers in history (his most recent films were honored in Crave’s Best Movies of the Decade (So Far) podcast), and has been directing acclaimed films like In Jackson Heights and National Gallery since 1967.
Anne Coates is an Oscar-nominated editor whose career spans more than half a century. Among her many credits: Lawrence of Arabia, Murder on the Orient Express, The Elephant Man, Out of Sight and 50 Shades of Grey.
Lynn Stalmaster is a casting director who helped assemble the iconic performers behind a plethora of classic films, including In the Heat of the Night, Harold and Maude, Deliverance, Superman: The Movie and Tootsie.
The Governors Awards will be honored at a special event in November.
Top Photo: Dimension Films
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved, Rapid Reviews and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
