Cheng Pei-pei (6 January 1946 – 17 July 2024) was a Hong Kong-American actress who started her career in 1963 and was considered cinema's first female action hero.

[1][2] She is known for films Come Drink with Me (1966), Flirting Scholar (1993), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), TV series Young Justice Bao (2000), Chinese Paladin (2004) and reality show Divas Hit the Road (2014).

[4] Cheng attended World Elementary School in Shanghai, where she was a schoolmate of future movie stars Grace Chang and Chen Hou.

Cheng gained fame for starring in the Hong Kong wuxia film Come Drink with Me (1966), directed by King Hu.

Set during the Ming Dynasty, it stars Cheng as Golden Swallow, a skilled swordswoman on a mission to rescue her brother.

[6] In 1970, at the peak of her career, Cheng married and subsequently retired from acting, moving to the United States for her husband's business endeavors.

[7] In the 1980s, Cheng founded a television production company in the United States and traveled across Hawaii and Northern California at her own expense to produce a documentary series about Chinese Americans.

In 2000, she returned to international attention with her role as Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon[8], directed by Ang Lee, whom Cheng had befriended in the 90s when she was host of KSCI's Mandarin talk show, Pei-Pei's Time.

"[10] In 2019, Cheng was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, but chose to keep the diagnosis private and spend her remaining time with her children and grandchildren.

[17] In 1970, Cheng married Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung, whose father was the agent for Shaw Brothers in Taiwan.