A veteran film and television actor she may be, but Nora Miao Ke-hsiu is still mostly known for the love-interest roles she played opposite Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury and Way of the Dragon. It's an image she is set to dispel with her first screen role in 18 years: in Sylvia Chang Ai-chia's Run Papa Run, the 56-year-old plays a tough single mother who runs a traditional Chinese bonesetter's clinic while raising her son.
'The character is totally different from the roles I played before,' she says. 'This is the first time I don't have to look at the mirror and care about my makeup on set.' And it's hardly a walk-on part; her character is a constant presence throughout the film, as she badgers her mobster son (played by Louis Koo Tin-lok) about what he does for a living.
Miao (right, with Koo) agreed to come out of retirement to be in Run Papa Run because she was moved by the attention the film's director Sylvia Chang Ai-chia and producer Willie Chan Chi-keung lavished on her. She still remembers being taken aback when the pair called her at her home in Toronto, where she has lived since 1990. 'I was a bit surprised people thought about me and asked me to play in a movie after all these years,' she says.
Miao and Chang were once both actors at Raymond Chow Ting-hsing's Golden Harvest in the early 1970s, but had never collaborated on a film.
'I've seen movies she has directed,' she says. 'She's very good at handling emotional scenes and relationships between people. It was fun, although the people and environment were a bit strange to me,' she says. 'But acting-wise, it's the same as the old days.'
Miao began her career in TV in 1968 and joined Golden Harvest soon after the studio was founded by Chow and Leonard Ho Koon-cheung, both renegades from Shaw Studios. Her big break came in 1971, alongside Bruce Lee in The Big Boss, the kung fu master's first project for the studio.
Her role in that film was a bit part but she cut a much higher profile in her next two projects with Lee. In Fist of Fury, she plays Yuan, a martial arts student studying at the same kung fu academy as Lee's character, Chen Jeh, and was the only actor to share a screen kiss with Lee. She was paired with the actor again in Way of the Dragon, playing Chen Ching-hua, an owner of a Chinese restaurant in Rome who looks to Tang Lung (Lee), a master fighter from Hong Kong, for protection against local thugs.