Lam Ching-Ying

Peking opera school first, then the stunt floor. Lam trained at Fan Fok-Fa's Spring and Autumn Drama School and came into film as a stuntman, which in early 1970s Hong Kong meant taking falls for other people. He turns up in the Bruce Lee films, mostly uncredited: a tournament fighter in Enter the Dragon, a student in Fist of Fury, Ah Yen in The Big Boss, a Macau fighter in Game of Death. He is also somewhere in A Touch of Zen and in a long list of 1970s martial arts pictures where his credit is a single word.

What made him more than a stuntman was posture. Lam stood absolutely straight, moved without visible preparation, and had a face that refused to react, which turned out to be the funniest possible thing to place next to Sammo Hung, whose stunt team he belonged to. Through the 1980s he was the straight man of Hong Kong action comedy: Leung Yee-Tai in The Prodigal Son, the inspector in Encounters of the Spooky Kind, and parts in Warriors Two, Knockabout, Winners & Sinners, My Lucky Stars, Heart of Dragon, Millionaires' Express, Eastern Condors, Pedicab Driver and Painted Faces.

Then Mr. Vampire in 1985, and an entire genre grew out of one performance. His one-eyebrowed Taoist priest, unflappable in the middle of hopping corpses and useless apprentices, is the character he played in one form or another for the rest of his career: Mr. Vampire II and III, Vampire vs. Vampire, Magic Cop, Crazy Safari, The Dead and the Deadly, Encounters of the Spooky Kind II, Mr Vampire 1992. He worked as an action director too. Liver cancer ended everything before he turned fifty, which is why the filmography simply stops in the mid 1990s.