Kien Shih

Despite being 30 years his senior, Kien Shih gives Bruce Lee a run for his money in the 1973 kung fu classic "Enter the Dragon." Indeed, such is Kien's menacing dexterity as Han, the drug lord with a metal hand, that the mirror sequence and the climactic battle remain genre landmarks. Yet Kien was a sickly child and only took up martial arts for health reasons. Schooled in a variety of techniques (which made him such a compelling and versatile screen fighter), he began performing in morale-boosting shows during the Sino-Japanese War and followed mentor Hu Chun-Bing into films, as a makeup artist, in 1939. The following year, he made his debut as a secret agent in "Flower in a Sea of Blood" and went on to appear in somewhere between 350 and 500 movies. Having played the nemesis White Brow Monk in a series about folk hero Fong Sai-Yuk, Kien played various villains opposite Kwan Tak-Hing in around 80 pictures about another legendary pugilist, Wong Fei-Hung. Sadly, many of these films are now lost, but Kien's energetic brand of cackling malevolence can be seen in the 1966 actioner "Jade in the Red Dust." Thankfully, he was among the few to make the transition as Hong Kong movie styles changed in the 1970s and he developed the "Uncle Kien" persona that saw him play the cop confronting Jackie Chan in "The Young Master" and the fathers of Brigitte Lin and Tony Leung Ka-fai in "Lady in Black" and "A Better Tomorrow III."