Who Trained Jackie Chan?

Even people who don't like Kung Fu movies like Jackie Chan. It's hard not to. As an actor and director, he's charming, beguiling, and boy howdy, can he ever perform a stunt. Born in 1954 in Hong Kong, Chan didn't actually start out as an action hero, or even as a martial artist. He was trained and educated at the Chinese Opera Research Institute which, as Biography.com tells us, was a boarding school that taught martial arts, in addition to drama, acrobatics, and singing. He was part of a performance group produced by the school, and excelled in both martial arts and acrobatics. While he pretty much invented the Kung Fu Comedy genre of film with Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, he's also top-selling singer who's extremely popular in Asia, especially Japan. He even performed a song at the closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and frequently performs theme songs for his movies.

Chan started out doing stunts on Bruce Lee films, and once in the film industry concentrated on his martial arts skills, studying hapkido under grand master Jin Pal Kim, a martial arts film star in his own right, and one-time personal bodyguard of Lyndon B. Johnson. Eventually he earned a black belt in that discipline, and has also studied karate, judo, taekwondo, and jeet kune do. His big break (so to speak) came with 1978's Drunken Master. According to an article on Kotaku, that film saw him nearly blinded by a break in the bone under his eyebrow. The year after Drunken Master he was directing his own feature films. 

There's no question that the kind of discipline he developed as a child has paid off in his career. Nevertheless, he's had his share (and more) of on-the-job accidents, including one fall that resulted in emergency skull surgery and a permanent plastic plug "to keep my brains in," he has said. Many, if not most, of his other films have resulted in some kind of injury or dislocation. It doesn't stop him, of course. He's generally considered one of the most-recognizable people in the world, and one of the world's most popular film stars of any genre.