Tony Jaa The Muay Thay Master

Date of Birth
5 February 1976, Surin, Thailand

Birth Name
Panom Worawit

Height
5' 6" (1.68 m)

Mini Biography

Panom Yeerum was born on February 5, 1976, in the northeastern province of Surin, Thailand. His parents were elephant herders. Panom watched martial arts films as a young kid and began to emulate some of his idols, from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan to Jet Li. After seeing the Thai action film Kerd ma lui (2004) ("Born to Fight"), Panom met and studied martial arts and stunt work as a teen under the director of that film, Panna Rittikrai. Panom went to university where he studied a variety of martial arts, from tae kwondo to judo. It was not long before Panom would get work, doubling for Robin Shou and James Remar in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), and when his demo reel was seen by director Prachya Pinkaew, the film Ong-bak (2003) was created for Panom, who is now going by the name of Tony Jaa in hopes of bringing his style of action to international audiences.
IMDb Mini Biography By: Ninja01

Trivia

Stunt-man turned actor who does not use any wire work or CG effects in his stunts.

Highly Skilled in Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do, swordplay and gymnastics.

Watching Jackie Chan movies and a Thai movie called Kerd ma lui (2004) ("Born to Fight") influenced him to do stuntwork and eventually become a action star, but he says his biggest influence is Bruce Lee.

Born in a northeastern province of Thailand called Surin.

Robin Shou's stunt double in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997).

Does 8 hours of gymnastics, Muay Thai, and other sports training a day.

Is actually of Cambodian descent, more known as "Khmer Surin".

He speaks Thai, Khmer and he is learning English.

Personal Quotes

"Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee are my masters; they're the inspiration for my work. Bruce Lee was a heavy fighter who threw hard punches. Jackie moves very fast and uses a lot of comedy, and Jet Li is very fluid. I've tried to combine all of their styles and added some things of my own."

"I want a strong foundation in Thailand. Hollywood? Maybe in the future."

Real Story of Wong Fei Hung The Kung Fu Master

Wong Fei-Hung was born in 1847, and passed away in 1924. He was a martial arts master, teacher, healer, and revolutionary. He would protect and help those who were weak and defenseless. Wong Kay-Ying was his father, and he was a physician and great martial arts master also, and part of a group known as the "Ten Tigers of Kwantung," and he and his son lived in the city of Canton.
Wong Kay-Ying's famous medical clinic was Po Chi Lam, and Wong Fei-Hung was there assisting his father. He learned traditional Chinese medicine, and also learned many important values such as generosity and compassion. Wong Kay-Ying always treated a patient, even if he or she was a complete jerk or was poor. He would also secretly treat revolutionaries who were the resistance against the corrupt Ch'ing Dynasty.
The Ch'ing Dynasty consisted of Manchu emperors, who had conquered China from there home in Manchuria. They were foreign invaders to the southern Chinese. The southern Shaolin Temple in Fukien was a place where revolutionaries would go to train to fight against the Manchus. The temple was destroyed in 1734, but the few monks and students who escaped traveled throughout China to teach their skills. Some styles such as Wing Chun (Bruce Lee's original style) and Hung Gar Kung Fu (Wong Fei-Hung's style) emerged. The creator of Hung Gar was Hung Hei-Kwun (another martial arts master that was portrayed by Jet Li in New Legend of Shaolin). He was a Fukien tea merchant.
Wong Fei-Hung's martial arts training began when he met with his father's teacher, Luk Ah Choi. Luk Ah Choi taught Wong Fei-Hung the basics of Hung Gar. After, Wong Kay-Ying took over his son's training. By his early 20's, Wong Fei-Hung had made a name for himself as a dedicated physician and a martial arts prodigy. In addition to becoming a master of hung gar, he created the tiger-crane form and added fighting combinations now known as the "nine special fists." Wong Fei-Hung was also skilled with many weapons, especially the long wooden staff and the southern tiger fork. One occasion where he utilised his skill with the staff was when he defeated a thirty-man gang on the docks of Canton. He also protected the weak and poor from both criminal gangs and government forces.

However, his life was not all great joy and triumphs. Wong Fei-Hung's son, Wong Hawn-Sum, followed his father's foot steps by protecting the weak and poor of Canton. Unfortunately, he was killed in the 1890's after being gunned down by the drug gang Dai Fin Yee. After this tragedy, Wong Fei-Hung vowed never to teach his remaining 9 sons martial arts, unless they were targets themselves.
Also, Wong Fei-Hung's first three wives died young, and after, decided to live the rest of his life alone. But in 1903, during an outdoor martial arts demonstration, he met a 16 year old girl named Mok Gwai Lan, and asked for her hand in marriage. She was also a skilled martial artist who taught all of the women's classes, and even taught some of the men's classes, which was rare since hardly any women mastered kung fu at the time. In 1924, Wong Fei-Hung died peacefully, a happy and humble man.

Wong Fei-Hung is truly a hero of China. A hero is somebody noted for feats of courage. A hero does righteous things not for money, not for any other venal motivations except, for the benefit of everybody else.

Jacky Chan Biography

The boy who would become Jackie Chan was born April 7, 1954 with the name Chan Kong-sang in Hong Kong. Compared to many other mainland refugees (as a result of China's Communist revolution), the Chan family had it fairly easy. His parents worked for the French ambassador; his father as a cook, his mother as a maid.

When Jackie was 17, he graduated from the China Drama Academy. Unfortunately the Chinese opera was no longer very popular, so Jackie and his classmates had to find other work. This was difficult because at the school they were never taught how to read or write. The only work available to them was unskilled labor or stunt work. Each year many movies were made in Hong Kong and there was always a need for young, strong stuntmen. Jackie was extraordinarily athletic and inventive, and soon gained a reputation for being fearless; Jackie Chan would try anything. Soon he was in demand.

Over the next few years, Jackie worked as a stuntman, but when the Hong Kong movie industry began to fail, he was forced to go to Australia to live with his parents. He worked in a restaurant and on a construction site. It was there that he got the name "Jackie." A worker named Jack had trouble pronouncing "Kong-sang" and started calling Jackie "little Jack." That soon became “Jackie” and the name stuck.

Jackie was becoming a huge success in Asia. Unfortunately, it would be many years before the same could be said of his popularity in America. After a series of lukewarm receptions in the U.S., mostly due to miscasting, Jackie left the States and focused his attention on making movies in Hong Kong. It would be 10 years before he returned to make Rumble in the Bronx, the movie that introduced Jackie to American audiences and secured him a place in their hearts (and their box office). Rumble was followed by the Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon series which put Jackie on the Hollywood A List.

Despite his Hollywood successes, Jackie became frustrated by the lack of varied roles for Asian actors and his own inability to control certain aspects of the filming in America. He continued to try, however, making The Tuxedo, The Medallion, and Around the World in 80 Days, none of which was the blockbuster that Rush Hour or Shanghai Noon had been.

Yip Man Legendary Wing Chun Master

Yip Man was born on October 1st, 1893. He was the first martial arts master to teach the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun openly. He had several students who later became martial arts teachers in their own right, including Bruce Lee.

Yip Man (alternative spelling Ip Man) was the last Wing Chun student of Chan Wah-shun when he was 70 years old. He was the second son of a very wealthy family in Foshan, Guangdong, and received an exceptional traditional Chinese education.

When Yip Man was thirteen years old he started learning Wing Chun. Because of his sifu's old age, Yip Man learned most of his lessons from his second sihing Ng Chung-sok. After three years Chan Wah-shun died, but one of his dying wishes was to ask Ng to continue with Yip's training.

At age sixteen, Yip Man went to attend school at St. Stephen's College in Hong Kong, which was an upmarket secondary school for wealthy families and foreigners who lived in Hong Kong. According to one story, one day one of his classmates challenged him to try his martial arts skill with an older man. The man who Yip Man competed against beat him with a few strikes. It turned out that the old man was his sibak Leung Bik, son of his sigung. After that encounter, Yip Man continued to learn from Leung Bik. At age 24, Yip Man returned to Foshan, and his Wing Chun skills had improved tremendously while he had been away. His fellow students believed he learned a different kind of martial art and treated him as a traitor to Wing Chun.

In Foshan, Yip Man didn't formally run a Wing Chun school, but taught Wing Chun to several children of his friends and relatives. Amongst those informal students, Chow Kwong-yue, Kwok Fu, Lun Kai, Chan Chi-sun and Lui Ying were the most well known. Chow Kwong-yue was said to be the best student among his group of pupils, but he eventually went into commerce and dropped out of martial art all together. Kwok Fu and Lun Kai went on to teach students of their own and the Wing Chun in the Foshan and Guangdong area was mainly descended from those individuals. Chan Chi-sun died young, and Lui Ying went to Hong Kong; neither of them taking on any students.

During the Japanese occupation of China, Yip Man refused several invitations to train the Japanese troops. Instead, he returned to Hong Kong and opened a martial arts school. When he initially began the school, business was poor because his students typically stayed for only a couple of months before leaving. He moved his school to Hoi Tan Street in Sham Shui Po and then to Lee Tat Street in Yau Ma Tei. By that time some of his students were trained to a sufficiently high enough skill level that they were able to start their own schools. Some of Yip Man's students and descendants compared their skills with other martial artists in combat. Their victory over other martial artists helped to bolster Yip Man's reputation as a teacher. In 1967, Yip Man and some of his students established the Hong Kong Ving Tsun Athletic Association. Bruce Lee, Yip Man's most famous pupil, studied under him from 1954 to 1957. When Yip Man retired, many of his students were themselves teaching Wing Chun, including Wong Shun Leung, William Cheung, Lo Man Kam (Yip Man's nephew), Moy Yat and his two sons Yip Chun and Yip Ching. In 1972, Yip Man suffered from throat cancer and subsequently died on December 2 of that year. As a fitting obituary for the man, within the three decades of his career in Hong Kong, he established a training system for Wing Chun that eventually spread across the world.

Biography of Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee (Lee Hsiao Lung), was born in San Fransisco in November 1940 the son of a famous Chinese opera singer. Bruce moved to Hong Kong when he soon became a child star in the growing Eastern film industry. His first film was called The birth of Mankind, his last film which was uncompleted at the time of his death in 1973 was called Game of Death. Bruce was a loner and was constantly getting himself into fights, with this in mind he looked towards Kung Fu as a way of disciplining himself. The famous Yip Men taught Bruce his basic skills, but it was not long before he was mastering the master. Yip Men was acknowledged to be one of the greatest authorities on the subject of Wing Chun a branch of the Chinese Martial Arts. Bruce mastered this before progressing to his own style of Jeet Kune Do. At the age of 19 Bruce left Hong Kong to study for a degree in philosophy at the University of Washington in America. It was at this time that he took on a waiter's job and also began to teach some of his skills to students who would pay. Some of the Japanese schools in the Seattle area tried to force Bruce out, and there was many confrontations and duels fought for Bruce to remain. He met his wife Linda at the University he was studying. His Martial Arts school flourished and he soon graduated. He gained some small roles in Hollywood films - Marlowe- etc, and some major stars were begging to be students of the Little Dragon. James Coburn, Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin to name but a few. He regularly gave displays at exhibitions, and it was during one of these exhibitions that he was spotted by a producer and signed up to do The Green Hornet series. The series was quite successful in the States - but was a huge hit in Hong Kong. Bruce visited Hong Kong in 1968 and he was overwhelmed by the attention he received from the people he had left. He once said on a radio program if the price was right he would do a movie for the Chinese audiences. He returned to the States and completed some episodes of Longstreet. He began writing his book on Jeet Kune Do at roughly the same time. Back in Hong Kong producers were desperate to sign Bruce for a Martial Arts film, and it was Raymond Chow the head of Golden Harvest who produced The Big Boss. The rest as they say is history.