Barely had Jimmy Wang Yu stepped out of his hotel in Cannes when three young Frenchmen came rushing forward, pen and paper ready. They reeled off the titles of the veteran actor's most famous films - The Chinese Boxer, The One Armed Swordsman, Master of the Flying Guillotine - and gushed as their idol thanked them, shook their hands and gave them his autograph.
'We saw your films when we were this little,' one said, gesturing a child's height.
'They were just giving me face by saying that,' said Wang as he returned to his seat inside the hotel.
But his enduring legacy was more vividly revealed at the gala premiere of Wu Xia at the Cannes Film Festival last week. While the film's top-billing stars are Donnie Yen Ji-dan, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tang Wei, it was Wang's name that received the biggest cheer from the audience during the film's opening credits.
Such a response was perhaps surprising, given how Wang's career peaked in the 1960s and '70s. He has been in only 10 films in the past 30 years, the last one being Beheaded 1,000, a 1993 flop which he produced and funded with his own money. He's been keeping a very low profile ever since he retired from the screen, and now lives in a 3,700 square metre mansion on the outskirts of Taipei and spends his time trading traditional Chinese liquor with a mainland associate.
With his eye-catching turn as Wu Xia's major villain, Wang has returned to show business with a bang. Though he admitted a double was used in many of his fighting scenes with Yen, who plays the film's papermaker-with-a-past protagonist, he still radiates a glowering presence when he's on screen, whether letting rip at his inept underlings' mission in taking Yen's character down, or during the film's final fight, with him pitted against Yen and Kaneshiro.
Wang said he had known director Peter Chan Ho-sun since the days when they both worked for Golden Harvest, the Hong Kong film studio which produced Wang's films in the 1970s and where Chan once worked as a production manager. 'We haven't worked together before but I've liked all his films,' Wang said.