HAPKIDO, released to theaters in the U.S. The films I consider her best have tons of fight scenes starring her. However, in too many of her later films, her fight scenes are few and far between.

In several of her films she has to compete for time with some formidable co-stars, including Sammo Hung, Carter Wong and Jhoon Rhee (who brought taekwondo to the U.S.), but too much of a good thing is better than not enough of a good thing. I tend to judge Angela Mao films by the amount of fight footage devoted to her. She was also quite beautiful and the smart directors gave her plenty of closeups. She was a fine actress and was always believable in her fighting roles, although, truth to tell, there was never much characterization written into the scripts. She fought hard and did most of her own stunts, doubled only for some of the most virtuoso acrobatic spins. While there were other notable female kung fu stars in the 1970s, Angela’s fight scenes are the most ferocious, the most intricate and the most intense. She also trained extensively in hapkido for her role in HAPKIDO, earning a 3 rd degree Black Belt, and used that skill in subsequent films, including WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES. Mao, but I do know that, like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, she trained at a Peking Opera school as a child and learned martial arts and acrobatics there. I don’t have much biographical information on Ms. A young Jackie Chan was action director on DANCE OF DEATH. Yuen Wo Ping, a future kung fu director in his own right, co-directed the action scenes of BROKEN OATH. She also had great action directors on these films, most notably her frequent co-star at GH, Sammo Hung, who served that function on ten of her movies there. Her best work remains the body of films she made at Golden Harvest, where she had top-notch directors like Huang Feng, who directed her in nine films, including four of her best Lo Wei, who directed Bruce Lee’s first two Hong Kong starring films King Hu (A TOUCH OF ZEN), who directed her in THE FATE OF LEE KHAN and the Korean director Chang-Hwa Jeong, who directed Mao in BROKEN OATH and is best known for KING BOXER, which started the worldwide kung fu craze when it was released in the U.S. (Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu were the other reigning GH stars, at least for part of that period.) She then moved from Hong Kong back to her native Taiwan and continued to make kung fu films there until 1980 and other types of films for a few years before leaving the business in 1983 with only a couple of cameos thereafter. Mao is probably best known to American fans for her portrayal of Bruce Lee’s ill-fated sister in ENTER THE DRAGON (1973), but she was one of the first kung fu stars to emerge from the newly-formed company, Golden Harvest, in 1970 and had a nice run as one of the studio’s top stars from 1970-77, when she made her last film for the studio. I didn’t have time for the fifth of her top five, LADY WHIRLWIND (1972) I watched what I consider her four best films for this piece: HAPKIDO (1972), WHEN TAEKWONDO STRIKES (1973), THE TOURNAMENT (1974), and BROKEN OATH (1977). My earlier VHS and DVD copies had all sorts of problems, so I’ve been wanting to sit down and watch these new editions and thought I’d use the occasion of her 66 th birthday today, September 20 th, to offer a write-up on them. Within the last two years, some of the best Hong Kong movies starring Angela Mao Ying have come out on DVD from Shout Factory, remastered, with cleaned-up soundtracks and new subtitles. The original post, which includes comments, can be found here. I re-watched two of her best films for this occasion, BROKEN OATH (1977) and HAPKIDO (1972), and decided to re-post the birthday tribute I did for her four years ago, on the occasion of her 66th birthday, after seeing several of her films, including these two, in new DVD editions. She remains, in my estimation, the greatest female kung fu star ever.

Anghele mou