Bolo was born on 3 July 1946. he began his martial arts training at the age of 10 in Guangzhou, Guangdong, where he studied under several kung Fu masters. Growing up, he took an interest in bodybuilding, and later became Mr. Hong Kong’s bodybuilding champion. He held the title for ten years.
Because of his impressively muscular physique he was chosen for several bad guy movie roles, with which his first big break came alongside the legendary Bruce Lee in the 1973 movie Enter the Dragon, where he played the role of ‘Bolo’.
Yeung met Bruce Lee while the two were filming a Winston cigarettes commercial. A friendship emerged and Lee invited him to star in Enter the Dragon, after which he became known as “Bolo”, the name of the character he portrayed.
The two became close friends during the filming of Enter the Dragon, in which Lee and Yeung worked very closely on technique training. Yeung once stated in an interview, many years after Lee’s death, “There will never be another Bruce Lee; I am privileged to have had the honour of calling him my friend.”
During the 1970s and 1980s, Yeung starred in numerous martial arts films, but his breakout film was Bloodsport. Shot on a 1.5 million USD budget, it became a box office hit in the spring of 1988. Jean-Claude Van Damme had the leading role as Frank Dux, while Yeung played the role of Chong Li. A strong friendship formed between the two actors on the set of Bloodsport, and Van Damme invited Yeung to appear in his subsequent film Double Impact.
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