Yu So Chow
| Yu So-chow | |
|---|---|
| Chinese name | 于素秋 |
| Chinese name | 于素秋 (traditional) |
| Chinese name | 于素秋 (simplified) |
| Born |
9 July 1930 Beijing, China |
| Died | 12 May 2017 (aged 86) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Years active | 1948–1966 |
| Spouse(s) | Mak Bing-wing (m. 1966; d. 1984) |
| Parents | Yu Jim Yuen |
Yu So-chow (Chinese: 于素秋; pinyin: Yú Sù Qiū; Cantonese Yale: yū sou chāu; 9 July 1930 – 12 May 2017) was a Chinese actress. She was born in Beijing to a Peking opera family. She is the daughter of late Master Yu Jim Yuen who ran the China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera School in Hong Kong, and teacher of many well-known actors.
She started her acting career in 1948 and made over 240 films in the wuxia, kung fu, action, detective and Cantonese opera genres. Her films were successful at the box-office and she was one of the most popular superstars of the 1960 in Asia and Hong Kong.
Yu learned Peking Opera at the age of eight and made her stage debut at the age of nine. She specialized in playing female warrior roles in which she could skillfully demonstrate her footwork by continuously juggling and kicking back twelve red-tasselled tuo shou (脫手) spears, as seen in one of her famous stage Peking operas, The White Snake (白蛇傳), and in the 1951 film Amazon on the Sea (海上女霸王).
Her first movie was made in 1948. She was one of the three actresses in the 1950s who really knew martial arts. Off the screen, she was virtually a heroine: at the age of sixteen, she alone successfully fought off a group of gangsters with only a silky belt on the streets of Shanghai.
Her early wuxia pictures from 1948-57 were in both Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue, with stories intended to increase cooperation of the Northern Style and Southern Style of martial arts, as seen in The heroine of deadly darts (女俠響尾追魂鏢) in 1956. These remarkable wuxia films were mostly based on kung fu novels, e.g. Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery Pt 1 & Pt 2 (火燒紅蓮寺) in 1950, The Golden Hairpin Pt 1 & Pt 3 (碧血金釵) in 1963, Buddha’s Palm (如來神掌), a four-part film, in 1964 and The Burning of Pingyang City (火燒平陽城) in 1965.
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