“Queen of martial arts films” Chen Pei-Pei dies at age 78

• CNA and AP staff writers

Actress Cheng Pei-pei, widely known as the “Queen of Martial Arts Films,” died on Wednesday at her home in the United States, her family announced on Friday. She was 78 years old.

Chen is a versatile actress with a career spanning six decades, who rose to fame starring in several period martial arts films, a genre known as “wuxia,” her agency, Hong Kong's Supreme Art Entertainment, said in a Facebook post on Friday.

According to the station, Chen had been in poor health in recent years but decided not to make his health problems public in order to spend more time with his family.

Photo: AP

Meanwhile, in its article about Chen's death, The Hollywood Reporter cited another Facebook post in which her children said, “In 2019, our mother was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative atypical Parkinsonian syndrome, informally known as Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD).” They said current medical treatments are unable to slow the progression of the disease and that their mother has donated her brain for medical research.

Born in Shanghai in 1946, Chan was dubbed the “Queen of Martial Arts Films” by the media in the 1960s for her success with the martial arts films she produced at the time under Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers Studio, including 1966's The Great Drunkard, which established the director's unique style of storytelling and a new martial arts film style.

She left the film industry after marrying a Taiwanese businessman in 1970 and moving to the United States, but returned to acting after their divorce in 1987.

Photo: Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International

Cheng continued to be a prolific actress after her return, winning Best Supporting Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2001 for her role as Jade Fox in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Her most recent film role was as the matchmaker in Disney's 2020 live-action remake of Mulan; her other notable film appearances include the 2014 British drama Lilting opposite Ben Whishaw and Meditation Park opposite Sandra Oh, the latter of which opened the 2017 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Chen also appeared on stage in 2015, playing a street vendor who believes her husband has been abducted by aliens in A Grain of Sand, a far-away planet, by director Stan Lai, a Taiwan-based performance workshop at the Lai Shengchuan Theatre in Shanghai.

“You need physical strength to do scenes in wuxia films. I'm not young anymore. Maybe I'd be better off doing a stage play,” she said at a press conference the day after the film's premiere in the Chinese city.