At age three he was diagnosed with a serious medical condition.

Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects. The family was rendered homeless by the big Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953. His father was a teacher, though rendered unable to work by tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites. Impoverished, the Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei. The Woo family, Christians faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five. Due to school age restrictions, his mother changed his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport. Woo was born Wu Yu-seng (Ng Yu-sum in Cantonese) in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War at the end of October 1946. He cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï. He created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo's Hollywood films include the action films Hard Target (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), the sci-fi action thriller Face/Off (1997) and the action spy film Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Hard Boiled (1992), and Red Cliff (2008/2009). He is considered a major influence on the action genre, known for his highly chaotic action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and frequent use of slow motion. He is the owner of Lion Rock Productions. John Woo SBS ( Wu Yu-seng Ng Yu-sum (Cantonese) born October 1946) is a Chinese-born Hong Kong film director, writer, and producer. Film director, producer, screenwriter, editor

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