The title of the first female action star is hotly contested, but the Hong Kong actor Cheng Pei-pei is often cited as one of the contenders, for her role in 1966 martial arts epic Come Drink With Me. Cheng, who has died aged 78 of a rare neurodegenerative condition, indisputably opened doors for women in martial arts cinema.

In practice, this meant opening windows, as on Golden Swallow, the 1968 sequel to Come Drink With Me. “[The director Chang Cheh] asked [the male actors] to jump out of a window, and me to walk through a door,” Cheng told the South China Morning Post. “I refused – I said I wanted to do the same thing. But he said: ‘You’re a lady, and ladies should be more refined.’ I insisted that I jump out of the window, or I would leave. Then I went to [the executive] Raymond Chow and cried. Finally, he allowed me to do it, because, after all, I was a swordswoman.”

Holding her own in the notoriously rough and ready Hong Kong film industry, Cheng helped feminise and modernise the wuxia (historical fantasy) genre during the first, late 60s and early 70s, wave of her career. Then, in 2000, following a long hiatus, she reaffirmed her feminist credentials, playing the embittered assassin Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a breakthrough to western mainstream cinema for wuxia. Her character kills her master because he will sleep with her, but not train her – and Cheng portrayed the poison dart-spitting Fox with full-bore intensity and a characteristic melee fighting style that verged on a straining desperation.

Cheng found healthier outlets for self-expression than the murderous Jade Fox, despite turbulent beginnings. Born in Shanghai, Pei-pei was six when her father, Jiang Xuecheng, an ink-factory owner, was sent by the communists to the Mongolian labour camp where he died, because of his Kuomintang nationalist affiliation. Her mother moved the family to Hong Kong – but left the eldest of her four children, Pei-pei, behind in the care of a nanny. An introvert and a film-buff, she thrived during six years of ballet training. “I just wanted to be a dancer,” she told Kung Fu magazine. “Because you don’t need to talk to express yourself, I could use my body.”

After she joined her family in Hong Kong in 1962, she enrolled in the Shaw Brothers studio actors’ training programme, where she added sword, knife and pole-fighting, as well as horse-riding, to her arsenal of physical skills. As a Mandarin speaker, she was fast-tracked into the studio’s Mandarin-language films, which commanded higher budgets and wider distribution than Cantonese works.

The film mogul Run Run Shaw saw this apple-cheeked starlet as a potential successor to Ivy Ling Po, who in 1964 had starred in a musical biopic of Mulan. Judging by her earliest appearances, Cheng seemed destined for decorous roles in opera and melodrama – until the wunderkind director King Hu took notice of her.

Aiming to infuse the wuxia with philosophical acuity and contemporary-feeling action in Come Drink With Me, his second film, Hu was specifically looking for a dancer for the lead role of Golden Swallow; the cross-dressing warrior searching for her kidnapped brother. “He wanted a different kind of rhythm,” Cheng told Film Freak Central in 2002. “Before, martial arts were portrayed as boom-boom-boom-boom [chops the air with evenly timed strokes]. Hu wanted b-boom, b-boom, b-boom: an arrhythmic pattern of gathering strength, contemplative pause, then sudden action. So I fashioned in my mind a jazz improvisation pattern.”

Cheng’s heightened sense of interiority – perhaps a result of her independent upbringing – was also a departure from the declamatory Shaw Brothers house acting style. Her unblinking focus was part of the reason for the big success of Come Drink With Me’s ravishing picaresque – and the film launched her as a star. Though she never again worked with Hu, who went to Taiwan shortly afterwards, she made about 20 features with Shaw Brothers, and was put on the fairly modest salary of HK$400 a month. Films such as Princess Iron Fan (1966), Golden Swallow and The Lady Hermit (1971) earned her the soubriquet “Queen of Swords” – though she was equally queen of awesome millinery.

Under pressure from her husband, the Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-tung, whom she married in 1970 and with whom she had four children, Cheng quit acting in the mid-70s and moved to the US. She attended business school at the University of California, Irvine, and founded a production company focused on making documentaries about Chinese-Americans. But by her own admission she lacked her husband’s business acumen, and it failed financially, a factor in the couple’s divorce in 1987.

She resumed her Hong Kong film career with parts in the Beijing opera biopic Painted Faces (1988) and the Stephen Chow vehicle Flirting Scholar (1993). After she interviewed Ang Lee as a young director on her Los Angeles cable TV show Pei-pei’s Time, he persuaded her to play a villain for the first time in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Grossing $218m worldwide, including a record-breaking take for a foreign-language film in the US, it reminded international audiences of her formidable and graceful aura.

She continued to rack up film credits – including a role opposite Ben Whishaw in the 2014 drama Lilting and one in Disney’s 2020 Mulan revival – until her diagnosis with corticobasal degeneration in 2019.

Cheng is survived by her children, Harry, Jennifer, Marsha and Eugenia.

• Cheng Pei-pei, actor and producer, born 6 January 1946; died 17 July 2024