SUBMITTED BY LClem

April 16, 2003 — WHEN the organisers of the Hong Kong Film Awards handpicked Chow Yun Fat to close the ceremony two Sunday nights ago, they could not have chosen a better man. If anybody could convince the crowd that things were going to be okay in spite of the economic dip, the SARS epidemic and singer-actor Leslie Cheung's sudden suicide, Chow - the good-humoured, heroic icon of Asian cinema - could. Dragging singer Alan Tam with him, he took the stage and spoke of his birth as a 'country boy' and of his joy, till today, in 'going to Kowloon City to buy vegetables'. Chow is superstar as regular bloke: charismatic and yet charmingly down-to-earth. The morning after chatting with Life! on the line from Hongkong, he sounds just as jovial and sensible. Chow, who turns 48 next month, is staying away from the United States because of its war with Iraq. Rather, he is staying put in Asia to promote his latest Hollywood picture, Bulletproof Monk. The actor, who has gone from making 10 movies every year in the late 1980s to making one every two years now, divides his time between his work in the US and his life of leisure - photography, taiji and other past-times - in Hongkong. Is he not scared of the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome? 'It's nothing. It's curable. It's harder to cure people of their panic,' he drawls in Cantonese. (Lots more to read at the link)