Cheng Pei-Pei, actress best-known in the West for the hit film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – obituary

She was known as ‘the Queen of Swords’, and she told an interviewer, ‘Swords are definitely my weapon of choice’

Cheng Pei-Pei, who has died aged 78, was a petite and punchy actress who made her biggest impact – in the West, at least – as the villainous governess Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Manipulating her charge into avenging her own heartbreaks, Jade Fox was central to that much-laurelled film’s enveloping historical sweep – and Cheng Pei-Pei, then in her mid-fifties, went toe to dynamic toe with far younger, gym-honed performers. “It’s really not that hard if you have a strong dance foundation,” she shrugged.
Yet Eastern viewers – and genre specialists – knew that the role drew on her comparably sprightly turns in a run of 1960s kung fu movies. Foremost among these was King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966), in which she played Golden Swallow, a young woman who poses as a boy to resolve an impasse between her overreaching governor father and the bandits stalking her province.
There were few better showcases for Cheng Pei-Pei’s delicacy of technique, her ability to pivot smoothly and persuasively from comic beats to the kind of dexterous action that earned her the soubriquet “The Queen of Swords”. “Swords are definitely my weapon of choice,” she told one interviewer in 2015. “You can be more agile with [them]… As I got older, I would fight more with a staff since it looked more appropriate for my age, but I found it to be awfully cumbersome.”
Come Drink with Me was a hit, propelling Cheng Pei-Pei to stardom, and setting a precedent for the lone female assassin that would influence Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. (Tarantino announced an intention to remake Come Drink with Me, but it never materialised.)
Yet Cheng Pei-Pei was ill-served by its sequel, Golden Swallow (1966) which, belying its title, marginalised her character in favour of the two men duelling over her. The genre was still struggling to know what to do with its women, as she explained: “Directors were over-protective of us. But I didn’t need any special treatment. I’m very proud, and competitive to a fault. I thought, ‘If a man can do it, so can I.’”
In later life she broke out of genre films, lending her years of experience to, among other titles, Hong Khaou’s Lilting (2014), one of the great British debuts of this century. Playing a bereaved Chinese-Cambodian immigrant reluctantly reaching out to her late son’s boyfriend (Ben Whishaw), Cheng Pei-Pei was fiercely unsentimental yet deeply moving, earning herself a British Independent Film Awards nomination for Best Actress.
As with many of her best roles, it depended heavily on body language and what could be conveyed through gesture alone. “I have never considered myself a martial arts lady, I’m really a dancer,” she said. “Fights are universal, but in drama you must know your culture and accept that; otherwise you won’t understand why something happens the way it does.”
Cheng Pei-Pei was born in Shanghai on January 6 1946, the eldest of four siblings, to Xuecheng Jiang, a businessman who opened China’s first ink factory, and his wife, a secretary. When she was six, her father was deemed counter-revolutionary and sent to a Mongolian labour camp; unbeknown to his family, he died there a decade later. Her mother altered the children’s surnames to spare them any further repercussions.
She studied ballet at Shanghai No 3 Girls’ School then in the early 1960s moved to Hong Kong, where she trained as an actor at the Shaw Brothers studio, turning heads with her fluent Mandarin and dancer’s flexibility. She landed her first lead in the Taiwanese drama Lovers’ Rock (1964), although the subsequently released The Lotus Lamp (1965) had been filmed a year earlier.
In 1970, Cheng Pei-Pei married the Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung and followed him to California. Though she gained a business degree there, the marriage eventually faltered. “My ex-husband didn’t like me to act and said I should study… I was pregnant eight times and only had three daughters and one son. Maybe I was doing too much, so had many miscarriages.” The pair divorced in 1987.
Returning home, she became a fixture of the Asian film and TV industries, making her comeback alongside Stephen Chow and Gong Li in the martial-arts parody Flirting Scholar (1993). She hosted a popular cookery-and-chat show, Pei-Pei’s Time, during which she interviewed and befriended Ang Lee, and even became a reality TV star after appearing in the first season of the Chinese hit Divas Hit the Road (2014-15).
Occasionally she ventured further afield, appearing in the arcade spin-off Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (2009), and as a brothel madam in the Aussie murder-mystery Goldstone (2016). Her final role was as the Matchmaker in Disney’s live-action Mulan (2020); she had previously appeared in two separate Chinese TV retellings of the same legend.
In 2019, Cheng Pei-Pei was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, an acute form of Parkinson’s; four years earlier, she had told Time Out Hong Kong: “There isn’t anything that I really want any more at this stage. I just want to help my children out in whatever way I can, so they can fulfil their own dreams.”
Cheng Pei-Pei is survived by those four children with Yuan, including the actress Eugenia Yuan, who starred in the Netflix sequel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016).
Cheng Pei-Pei, born January 6 1946, died July 17 2024