What actress Brigitte Lin said about a shock Jackie Chan film scene, working with Wong Kar-wai, and adjusting to fame

The Taiwanese actress called working with Wong Kar-wai ‘torture … but worth it’, and recalled being so scared by a scene in Police Story ‘my mind went blank’

Of her unexpected late-career success in martial arts films, she said, ‘I seem to embody some kind of fantasy about a beautiful woman performing violent acts’

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Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia in a still from Swordsman II (1992), in which she played the hermaphrodite Asia the Invincible and won legions of new fans.

Published: 5:15am, 11 Oct 2020Updated: 2:31pm, 11 Oct 2020

Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia is best known for her performance as the gender-bending Asia the Invincible in the 1992 hit martial arts fantasy Swordsman II .

While the film elevated her to superstar status in Hong Kong, she had been a star since the early 1970s, when she began her movie career in Taiwan, and Swordsman II marked the start of the short final phase of her illustrious film career.

Lin, who was Hong Kong’s reigning martial arts movie queen in the early 1990s, had no martial arts training, but could strike the necessary poses with gusto. She was surprised at her success in the film genre, and once told this writer that she thought it was because “I seem to embody some kind of fantasy about a beautiful woman performing violent acts”.

After Swordsman II, Lin became Hong Kong’s highest-paid actress, and was at one point working on six films at the same time – producers would coordinate her shooting schedule so that she could shuttle between sets.

Taiwanese film star Brigitte Lin after her retirement. Photo: SCMP

Lin retired from moviemaking in 1994, mainly due to fears for her personal safety. Triad involvement in the Hong Kong’s lucrative film industry was at its height at that time, and she felt it was too dangerous to continue working.