Quentin Tarantino once went to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to hear her speak at a film festival in the hope of meeting her. In martial arts cinema, Cheng Pei Pei is like Muhammad Ali — prolific, powerful, graceful and absorbing. She's a legend and like the former heavy weight champ, revered long after her prime. You get the impression Cheng never experienced a career pinnacle. Once she leapt into martial arts acting, she just kept soaring.

Amongst iced drinks in a North Sydney café, Hong Kong's queen of kung fu films shares her thoughts with me on life and the movies. At 60, she's remarkably beautiful, if slightly more worn than the porcelain young woman from the video cover of 1971's The Shadow Whip. Cheng sits next to her daughter Marsha Yuan (Hong Kong's Miss World entrant in 1999) and still holds her own. Yuan needn't be anxious about ageing.

"We got a chance to talk to each other now, maybe because in our last life we sitting [sic] here talking just like this. I believe that." A student of Buddhism since 1992, she appears accepting and patient. Cheng has no problem being a celebrity, even when being mobbed by adoring fans, particularly in Asia. "I don't mind, that was with me all my life, I'm used to it."

Cheng was born in Shanghai in 1946 as China moved toward communism. As a teenager she moved to Hong Kong to pursue a future in film by enrolling in the Actor's Training Course at Shaw Bros. film studio. After seven years making wuxia (martial chivalry) movies at their studios along Hong Kong's Clearwater Bay and following more than 40 other cinematic titles, Cheng is today honoured as an icon of the Asian film industry, recently commanding even wider acclaim with her role as Jade Foxx in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

As a peculiar, tall glass bottle is placed on our table, Cheng turns her focus from the movies momentarily. The bottle reminds me to ask her about the fantastical running up walls in Crouching Tiger. Director Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility and most recently Brokeback Mountain) used cables to hoist his actors into the air, though Cheng assures me it can be done without special effects. "Real people know how to run up the walls, I really saw someone do that!" With some translating by Yuan, Cheng tells the story of a thief captured by police, who escaped by darting up a building wall. "They really know how to use their energy, we call it chi gong, you know — it's very light, you make your body very light. You cannot fly but [can] do this [running up the walls] easily."

Lee's 2001 blockbuster altered the perception of Hong Kong kung fu films forever and sparked the current enthusiasm for Asian martial arts movies, including Zhang Yimou's Hero and his most recent offering House of Flying Daggers. It also scooped four Oscars along the way and catapulted Cheng to international stardom, after already being a legend in Asia for forty years! "If it [Crouching Tiger] forty years ago [sic], it's not quite ready but for this time just ready," suggests the icon modestly.

Her performance is understated beside the movie's leads Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, but Cheng's expert interpretation of the villainess is scene-stealing. She will tell you however, that these days anything can be made to look good on film, especially when Lee is turning the reel. "She used to be the Michelle Yeoh when I was in high school," says Lee in the DVD's commentary. "I think it's a great thing to have three generations of the queens of martial arts."

Cheng attributes much of her success to her first director and in essence, career mentor, King Hu. He was the masterful Chinese director who brought wuxia to life and guided Cheng through her early martial arts performances. In 1966, they collaborated on the classic Come Drink With Me, a film that bears a special place in her heart. "He taught me a lot — how to be in the show business, because you need to have a very strong personality. I think he actually influenced me a lot."

Today, Cheng's dream is to see one of her movies reproduced on stage, with Yuan, the third of her four children, in the lead role. She suggests that Tarantino might like to come and watch such a production."He's very nice, he said he watched all those films. He loves Chinese, Hong Kong films — Hong Kong martial arts. Actually Kill Bill, you can see a lot of Shaw Brothers' things in that."