Chao Hsiung
(Lin Chien-Chuan)
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Biography
When he played in 5 Fingers Of Death, he was a crazed Japanese killer, killing just for the fun of it. It was nothing for him to kill someone for you and then deliver their badly beaten corpse back to their school. He stole the show from everyone (except Lo Lieh), as he has played in countless Shaw Brothers films and as the bad guy he always delivered. During this time, he was one of the best bad guys around. With such a meanacing face and strong and powerful movements - he seemed destined for greater things. He was a favorite of director Ho Meng-Hua, working with him on a number of films.
It was director Ho, who saw him as a heroic lead and featured him in a series of Swordplay films. This was a major change for his persona, but he handled the roles with great tenacity, and performed well. In The Ambush and The Golden Lion, he showed us that, given the right roles, he could be just as heroic as Yueh Hua. While, he could pull these roles off, it was obvious, that his performances as a villain, easily outweighed his heroic roles. I found him to be a much more believable villain. If he had played nothing but villainous roles, he would have still had an a great deal of work. During the 60's and 70's, he was one of the more dependable villains of the martial-arts world.
In The Chinese Boxer with Jimmy Wang-Yu, he was almost twice as evil. He didn't waste much time when it comes to killing, and always found a way to get the job done. He liked to gang up on you, kind of like Chang Tao, when Yang Sze was around. Like many, he switched studios and joined Golden Harvest in (1973). His appeared in sucj major films as - Broken Oath, Shaolin Plot, and The Skyhawk - but not to the degree that he played them, at Shaw studios. He began to settle down in the late 70's, taking roles that didn't call for much killing (on his part) such as King Of Fists & Dollars. Here, he played a teacher, whose rivals, were out to get rid of him (quite a switch from the old days).