Film magnate Sir Run Run Shaw, who built the Shaw Bros. studio into the largest in Asia in the 1960s and ’70s, popularized the kung fu genre around the world and later became a major philanthropist, died Tuesday in Hong Kong.

    SIR Run Run Shaw, the billionaire film pioneer hailed as the inventor of the kung fu genre and who launched a media empire that stretched from Hong Kong to Hollywood, passed away peacefully Tuesday at his home in Hong Kong.

    Born in 1907 to a Shanghai textile merchant, Shaw was the sixth of eight children.

    He joined his elder brothers Runje Shaw and Runme Shaw in the film business in the 1920s. Runje Shaw had a silent film studio, and his brothers bought cinemas in places such as Singapore and Malaysia to show movies that were being made in Shanghai — then the center of the Chinese-filmmaking world. By the mid-1930s, they owned more than 100 theaters.

    World War II left the Shanghai industry in tatters. The Shaws, frustrated with the quality of films available to show in their theaters, decided to make a production base in Hong Kong.

    In 1957, when he was nearly 50 years old, Shaw made a grand bet on his movie dreams. He bought 46 acres (18 hectares) of hilly land in a remote part of the city — paying the British authorities in Hong Hong just 45 cents (US$0.058) per square foot (0.09 square meter) — and set out to build his dream factory.

    By the time Shaw Movietown officially opened in 1961, the mogul had 1,200 actors, directors and other employees on site, many of them living in dormitories. Visitors including Rock Hudson, Peter O’Toole and the Beatles came to see what was billed as “the busiest movie studio in the world” — a facility with 80,000 costumes, 12 soundstages and 16 permanent sets, including Chinese palaces, gardens and not least of all, a reproduction of the Great Wall.

    Life magazine also came calling, chronicling Shaw’s morning regimen of tea, noodles and qigong exercises, followed by a five-minute drive in his Rolls-Royce from his mansion down to the studio, where he would churn out up to 50 films a year. Shaw’s movies — particularly his martial arts pictures — won over audiences not just in Asia but around the world in the 1960s and ’70s, and influenced filmmakers from John Woo and Ang Lee to Quentin Tarantino for decades afterward.

    Shaw’s studio produced more than 1,000 films over more than five decades. He also co-produced American movies, including Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.”

    But his empire went much further, extending to movie theaters, amusement parks, magazines and later a sprawling television operation, Hong Kong’s first free television station Television Broadcast (TVB), that now produces thousands of hours of programming a year. TVB’s school has become well known for training top Chinese actors and directors, including Chow-yun Fat and Andy Lau.

    David Desser, an emeritus professor of film at the University of Illinois in the United States who now teaches at Chapman University, said the Shaw Bros. “modeled themselves after the Hollywood studios of the 1930s, with even greater control.”

    Actors and directors — not just from Hong Kong but also Taiwan, the mainland and even Japan — were put under contract. The studio spent significant sums on their movies, working in color and widescreen.

    But Shaw was known for keeping a close eye on the bottom line; one famous story had him refusing employees’ requests for some extra buns to eat. “Films are an art, but they’re also an industry. Forget that a moment and you have a money loser on your hands,” he said in a 1981 interview with Signature magazine.

    King Hu’s “Come Drink With Me” (1966) helped his studio usher in the era, and Chang Cheh’s 1967 hit “The One Armed Swordsman” broke box office records for the studio, luring audiences with violence and bloodletting.

    Eventually, rivals such as Golden Harvest would come to eclipse the Shaw Bros. But well into the 1970s, the Shaws expanded their global reach by setting up theaters in places with significant populations of Chinese, including San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

    “I make movies to satisfy the hopes and desires of my audience; and the core of my audience is Chinese. What they desire to see on the screen are folklore, romances and popular subjects in Chinese history with which they are already familiar,” Shaw said in a 1967 interview. “They miss the homeland they have left behind and the cultural tradition they are still cherishing.”

    The Shaw Bros.’ martial arts movies did more, though, than attract multiple generations of Chinese-American families, Desser noted. They drew in film buffs and cineastes, popularizing the kung fu genre stateside.

    Just as kung fu began to explode, Shaw began moving into the then-infant business of television in Hong Kong, launching TVB in 1967 and largely exiting the film business by the late 1980s.

    But even Shaw’s move to television, Desser noted, had an influence on film, as TVB trained and gave opportunities to a new generation of directors, many of whom like Wong Kar-wai would become key players in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema of the late 1970s and early ’80s.

    More recently, TVB’s acting training program has graduated a slew of performers who have gone on to fame, including Tony Leung, who was named best actor at Cannes in 2000 for Wong’s “In the Mood for Love.”

    Shaw himself continued working with TVB, giving up his chairman title at age 104. Celestial Pictures acquired rights to the extensive Shaw Bros. film library in 2003 and has released scores of its titles on DVD.

    Besides of media business, Shaw became a major philanthropist in his 70s, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to schools and universities, primarily in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland. Buildings and schools named after him have sprung up in almost every province in recent decades. Among those that have benefited from his donations are the Run Run Shaw Primary School in Xiangtan, Hunan Province; teaching buildings in the Tibetan Traditional Medine College in Lhasa, capital of Tibet; and the Inner Mongolia Hulunber Mengyi School in northern China.

    By 2012, Shaw had donated at least HK$4.75 billion (US$612.8 million) to more than 6,000 education-related projects, China News Service reported, making him one of Hong Kong’s most generous donors.

    In 2002, he established the Shaw Prize, which awards US$1 million each year to researchers who have made breakthroughs in three areas: astronomy, life science and medicine and math.

    In 2007, at the age of 100, Shaw received an honorary award by the Ministry of Civil Affairs for his lifetime’s achievement in philanthropy. Shaw was Knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1977. People then also call him “Ah Sir.”

    Shaw’s first wife, Lily Wong Mee-chun, married to him in 1937 and died at age 85 in 1987. He remarried to Mona Fong, formerly known as Fong Yat-wa, in Las Vegas in 1997. A former singer, Mona Fong joined TVB as a procurement manager in 1969 and became the deputy chairman of TVB since 2000. Shaw had four children with his first wife Lady Lily Shaw, sons Vee Meng and Harold, and daughters Violet and Dorothy. All of his children studied at Oxford University. (SD-Agencies)