The Little Guy's Greatest Stunt JACKIE CHAN's star rose as he fell from roofs, cliffs and airplanes. Now he's just trying to stay on top By RICHARD CORLISS Early this year, appearing on Taiwanese TV to plug his new music CD, Asia's all-time favorite movie star looked worn and emotionally frail. Just 47, he seemed as old as a Shaolin sifu. "I am really very tired," he said, tears clouding his eyes. "When it comes down to it, I'm just a normal man. Going down the path that I am on is very, very hard." For almost as long as Jackie Chan has been Asian action cinema's premier exemplar and export, people have been wondering how long he can keep punishing himself. Police Story: hands bleeding, he slides down a three-story pole of electric lights. Project A: he jumps from the top of a 15-m tower, his fall broken only by cloth awnings. Drunken Master II: he swallows hot peppers and walks on hot coals while fighting a maniacal bad guy. This was the sacred covenant between the star and his fans: Jackie did his own stunts. These literally death-defying feats were remarkable as much for the damage Chan did to his body as the wit and grace he invested in them. His fans, watching him with awe and fear, peeking through splayed fingers, performed a complex stunt of their own: they teetered between praying this bundle of muscle would call it quits (for his safety), and hoping he wouldn't (for their moviegoing pleasure). And so Jackie has kept on. He's been keeping on since he was seven, when the boy Chan Kong-sang went to live and study at Master Yu Jim-yuen's China Drama Academy. There he spent grueling 17-hour days learning Peking Opera balletics in the company of Samo Hung and Yuen Biao, who would become his lifelong pals and frequent movie co-stars. Chan learned his fanatical show-biz dedication at the end of a whipping stick. The training regimen (of the sort dramatized in the film Farewell My Concubine) was exacting, sadistic and strangely satisfying, as the boy was forced to discipline his body in ways Nature was too timid to imagine. He had every reason to hate Master Yu, yet Jackie dedicated his 1998 autobiography to his memory. He knew that there was a purpose to the punishment. When he graduated at 17 and went into movies full time as a stuntman—including two bits opposite Hong Kong superstar Bruce Lee—Chan found another display case for his masochistic machismo. Since then, his credo has been constant: no pain is too great if it gives pleasure to the crowd. And always the crowd swelled. First a few pensioners in a park, when he was part of Master Yu's troupe. Then the stern brotherhood of stuntmen. Then the moviegoers wandering into one of his mid-'70s flop pictures and wondering, "Who is this runt pretending to be Bruce Lee?" (Director Lo Wei, blind to Jackie's unique appeal, gave him the name Sing Lung, which means "Becoming the Dragon"; it is still his screen name in Hong Kong.) Then larger audiences, suddenly flocking to his movies when he became an overnight star—after 15 years in show business—with the 1978 Drunken Master. For once left to his own skills and charms, he and director Yuen Wo-ping fashioned a character of irresistible humor and heart. Hong Kong stopped searching for the next Bruce Lee when it found the one and only Jackie Chan. He was 24. By 1985 he had become the biggest star in East Asia. But Chan had a bigger dream: to crack the U.S. market open like a cantaloupe yielding to a karate chop. For a decade or so, Chan had been the secret stash of cultists journeying to Chinatown theaters and video stores to find his films. That was fine for them but not with him. Jackie's candy smile is matched by his concrete will. And in 1998, on his fourth try, he wooed and won the West with Rush Hour ($141 million domestic gross). Its 2001 sequel ($226 million) is No. 28 on the list of all-time moneymakers in North America. No other Asian film star is in the top 100. Critics praise Chan's work as an actor-director (he has helmed 11 of his own features, and is the boss on all the rest) because of his keen eye for wide-screen compositions and for the sculpting of bodies in space. Everybody else loves him because he is one of them, at their most determined—an ordinary guy with extraordinary drive. Chan doesn't look like a star and wasn't born to be one. Instead, he used all that drive to get to the top, then fought like hell to stay there. A man of stern self-discipline and voracious appetites, he has been married since 1983 to '70s Taiwanese star Lin Fengjiao but is known to follow his groin when it points toward a pretty girl. He has been linked to everyone from the late Taiwanese singer Teresa Tang to sultry pop star and actress Anita Mui. In a 1999 scandal, he all but acknowledged paternity of a daughter by actress Elaine Ng; the press dubbed the child Little Dragon Girl. Hong Kong fans are known to turn on their idols for the slightest infractions: for dating a fellow who used to go with another actress or for wearing an inappropriate dress. Yet despite his transgressions, Chan has never surrendered the love of his possessive admirers. This may be because he is inexhaustibly gracious to them; or because his grin seems as genuine as it is full; or because he enjoys indulging the predations and prying of the Hong Kong and international press. (In 1995 an American journalist asked for 10 minutes of the star's time on the location of Thunderbolt; Jackie gave him three hours, running back to the reporter between takes to bark, with demanding cheerfulness, "O.K., next question!") His mixture of affability and fallibility makes for a potent blend: Chan is the rogue as nobleman, the everyman-king. Chan sees his stardom as a holy office. He heads foundations for the poor, the elderly and disabled. In December 2000 he fronted a star-laden concert in Las Vegas, selling out the 13,500-seat MGM Grand Arena, to raise money for his charities. That Christmas Eve he hosted a lunch for hundreds of seniors he bused in from California. He's as tireless a giver as he is a liver. No wonder Jackie looked pooped on Taiwan TV. Becoming a dragon isn't nearly the challenge of remaining one. A month later, when his mother died at 85, he seemed swathed in bereavement. But the star was soon back at work on his next film, Highlanders. As anyone who's seen a Jackie Chan film knows, our hero always drags himself out of frailty and despair to fight, spin, laugh and win. The man who has been threatening to retire for the past dozen years is doomed to take a licking and keep on kicking. How could he give up the mission he set for himself when he was seven? Killing himself, stunt by stunt, for our rapacious pleasure.