As a teenager, Yuen Qiu was known among her peers as 'the woman gangster'. It had something to do with her androgynous attire and boyish behaviour, but mostly the nickname stemmed from her training at Yu Jim-yuen's China Drama Academy, where she learned martial arts alongside Jackie Chan Kong-sang, Sammo Hung Kam-bo and Yuen Woo-ping. 'We did almost everything together. In fact, I consider myself to be one of the guys,' she says.
And she wasn't alone there. It might be mostly the men who emerged to become stars, but the academy - established in the 1960s and now considered the cradle of Hong Kong action cinema - was home to quite a few female students, such as (from left to right) Yuen Sing, Yuen Kuk, Yuen Po and Yuen Qiu. (These are all stage names and are all preceded with Yuen so as to mark them as Yu Jim-yuen's disciples.)
'There was no difference in being a girl at the academy. We practised, performed and ate together with the boys,' says Yuen Po.
Just like their male counterparts, the girls all joined the troupe when they were about 10 and practised the same stringent routines, acrobatic stunts as well as singing and performing in Peking opera.
'At the age of 16, I was still embarrassed doing girlish things - I cried so much when I was made to wear a dress by my aunt,' she says.
While most of the boys went on to become international Stars, few of the girls pursued careers in show business. In fact, Yuen Qiu is the only one who remains an active player in the business, her stellar turn (alongside China Drama Academy alumnus Yuen Wah) in Stephen Chow Sing-chi's Kung Fu Hustle (2004) earned her the best supporting actress award at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards. But Yuen Qiu's last prominent international screen appearance before Kung Fu Hustle had been in a role opposite Roger Moore in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun some 30 years earlier in 1974. 'It wasn't a good time for action actresses to prosper back then [in the 70s],' says the 59-year-old, who became a stuntwoman after seven years at the academy. 'There were few opportunities. I was a bit luckier than the others, or else I would have been just the same as them, [a name] nobody knows.'