Louis Fan | |||||||||||
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樊少皇 | |||||||||||
 Louis Fan at a press conference in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, on 22 May 2010 to promote The Legend Is Born – Ip Man. | |||||||||||
| Born | Fan Siu-wong 19 June 1973 | ||||||||||
| Occupation | Actor | ||||||||||
| Years active | 1985–present | ||||||||||
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| Children | 3 | ||||||||||
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| Chinese | 樊少皇 | ||||||||||
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Louis Fan Siu-wong (born 19 June 1973) is a Hong Kong actor and martial artist. He is best known worldwide for his starring role as Ricky in Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) and as Jin Shanzhao in Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010), as well as roles in numerous television series produced by TVB.
Fan is the son of Fan Mei-sheng, an actor contracted to the Shaw Brothers Studio. When he was 14, his father sent him to Xuzhou, China, to learn gymnastics and wushu.
After completing his studies, Fan returned to the Hong Kong film industry, and starred in Stanley Tong's Stone Age Warriors (1991). In 1992, at the age of 18, Fan portrayed the titular character in Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a Hong Kong film based on the manga Riki-Oh. He claims that the director and producers of the film met him at the Hong Kong Airport upon arrival and immediately offered him the role. Being a young, up-and-coming actor, he took the role without knowing what it was. He later said he was shocked to discover how bloody and violent the Riki-Oh manga was.
Fan was a contract artiste under the Hong Kong television station TVB throughout the 1990s, and he starred in several television dramas, including Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (1997) and Young Hero Fang Shiyu (1999). He left TVB in the 2000s, and appeared in several Taiwanese and mainland Chinese television series before focusing on films.
One of his most memorable film performances in the 2000s was as Jin Shanzhao, the tough Northern martial artist in the 2008 martial arts film Ip Man, which starred Donnie Yen as Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man. Fan's performance in Ip Man earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2009. He reprised his role as Jin Shanzhao in Ip Man 2, the 2010 sequel to Ip Man. He also portrayed a new character in The Legend Is Born – Ip Man (2010), another movie about Yip Man that is unrelated to Ip Man and Ip Man 2.
In 2018, Fan made his proper Hollywood movie debut in the film Attrition (2018) starring alongside Steven Seagal as an ally helping Seagal's character to take down a human trafficking cartel in Thailand.
Louis has a daughter, and a son named Alan, from his previous girlfriend; they broke up in 2002. In 2012, he began dating actress and singer JJ Jia. After announcing their engagement, the two were married on January 1, 2016 in a private ceremony in Hong Kong.[1] In November 2017, they had a daughter, nicknamed Little Rice Bowl (小飯兜).
