This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.

We started this week’s series the only way we knew how: with the Shaw Brothers. They’re the ones who got the ball rolling in Hong Kong, carving out a substantial Chinese film identity for the first time. But by the end of the ’70s, a new studio had emerged as top dog in Hong Kong. Today’s photo is from this iconic opening sequence.

Golden Harvest was founded by Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho, two executives from Shaw Brothers who left the company in 1970 to form their own studio. They took a different approach, working frequently with independent producers rather than keeping everything in-house, and offering actors higher pay and greater creative freedom. There were a few defectors from Shaw Brothers, but Golden Harvest’s big win was about to happen in 1971, when they inked a deal with Bruce Lee for The Big Boss. It was Bruce’s first starring role, after he’d turned down the standard contract offered by the Shaws.

Bruce Lee and Raymond Chow

While the Shaw Brothers should be credited as introducing kung fu movies to western audiences, Golden Harvest was the first Hong Kong studio to collaborate directly with Hollywood, producing 1973’s Enter the Dragon as a joint effort with Warner Bros. That was the first English-language kung fu film, and the last film Bruce Lee made before his sudden death. Since Golden Harvest really picked up speed at the end of the ’70s, they were also just in time to snag a young Jackie Chan, after his popularity exploded in 1978’s Drunken Master. Until rather recently, Golden Harvest had been behind nearly all of Jackie’s films, not to mention padding their portfolio with other A-listers like Jet Li and Donnie Yen.

If Shaw Brothers were the ones to first crystallize the kung fu genre, Golden Harvest really took it international, and gave us a roster of enduring superstars in the process.

This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.

Michelle Yeoh just oozes success. She’s great at everything — impeccably poised, ultra-likable in every role she’s played, and delivers serious acting chops that the snobbiest film critic would find difficult to scoff at. Unlike some of the other figures we’ve spotlighted this week, Yeoh doesn’t come from any strong background in martial arts. But that’s not enough to stop her from becoming the world’s most significant female kung fu star. Today’s photo is a still from Yeoh’s performance on the 1983 Miss Malaysia competition, as we appreciate her diverse life and work.

Yeoh was born in Malaysia, and actually learned English and Malay before tackling Cantonese (she performed her Mandarin-language lines in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon phonetically). From a young age it was dance, not martial arts, that drew her attention. She started ballet at the age of four, and at fifteen moved to the UK with her parents to enroll in the Royal Academy of Dance in London. A spinal injury stopped her from achieving her ballet major, and she turned her attention to choreography and other outlets.

By 1983, she was already on a totally different wave, winning the crown at the Miss Malaysia Beauty Pageant, and representing Malaysia at the Queen of the Pacific beauty pageant in Australia that same year (which she also won, because she’s a badass). That led to a turning point for Yeoh in 1984, when she appeared in a Guy Laroche commercial, which you’re about to watch right now.

The spot caught the eye of a small Hong Kong production studio and Yeoh entered the film industry, working with other greats from this week’s series like Sammo Hung and Yuen Woo-Ping. Her films were commercial successes, and her background in dance allowed her to do most of her own stunts.

International success came later. She actually retired from acting in 1987 after marrying Dickson Poon, who ran the aforementioned small production studio. The couple divorced in 1992 and Michelle Yeoh came back to become the superstar we all know and love, because we’ll be damned if some dude called Dickson Poon is going to get in the way of that. Only in the post-Poon era did we get some of Yeoh’s most iconic performances, like Tomorrow Never Dies, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Memoirs of a Geisha. She’ll be appearing this August opposite Constance Wu (of Fresh off the Boat fame) as the family matriarch in Crazy Rich Asians.

Michelle Yeoh has worn many hats: actor, dancer, beauty queen, conservationist, and martial artist, to name a few. We love Yeoh’s work, and so should you.

This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.

Sammo Hung is a legend, whose hand has touched almost every aspect of modern kung fu cinema. Today’s photo is Sammo rocking luscious locks and gold chains.

Sammo Hung was thrust into martial arts performance at a young age. Both his parents worked as costume designers, so he was looked after by his grandfather, a film director, and his grandmother Qian Siying, one of China’s earliest kung fu film stars. When Hung turned nine his grandparents enrolled him in the China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera school in Hong Kong. This would prove to be influential — during his seven years at the academy, Hung would become close friends with another student, who had taken on the apprentice name Yuen Lo. Yuen Lo would eventually achieve international fame under the name Jackie Chan, but Hung himself played a big role in that process.

Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan made their acting debut together in 1962’s “Big and Little Wong Tin Bar”

Sammo and Jackie used to perform together in the kung fu group Seven Little Fortunes. Jackie is lovingly called da ge (“big brother”) by Chinese fans; Hung used to have the same nickname, but after Project A, which featured both actors, Hung ascended to da ge da (“biggest brother”). We talked about how Yuen Woo-Ping is partially responsible for Jackie’s signature style of kung fu/comedy crossover, but Hung had a big role in that too, helping to reimagine the genre toward the late 70’s, as Mandarin-language courtroom epics started to wane in popularity. That was right around the time when Drunken Master came out, making Jackie Chan into Jackie Chan.

Since then, Sammo has shaped basically every part of kung fu film culture in some way or another. Here’s the trailer for 1985’s Mr. Vampire, a seminal work in the jiangshi genre, a subgenre of kung fu vampire films that Hung is credited with inventing.

Look, here’s Sammo Hung fighting Bruce Lee that one time in the opening scene of 1973’s Enter the Dragon:

Sammo Hung has been everywhere and done everything. Today we salute him.