King Hu; Award-Winning Martial Arts Film Director

King Hu, considered the dean of Chinese martial arts action film directors, has died at the age of 65.

Hu, who had lived in Pasadena for several years, died Tuesday in a Taiwan hospital of heart problems, said Chen Mei of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Center for Motion Picture Study.

The director had planned to return to California after a brief trip to Taiwan to make a long-planned film about Chinese immigrant railroad workers in the 19th century titled “I Go, Oh No,” the names of two Northern California towns.

In 1975, Hu became the first Chinese to win the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He won for “A Touch of Zen,” a 6-year-old kung fu film that Times film writer Kevin Thomas lauded as “a 180-minute masterpiece.”

The director was also honored at the Los Angeles Film Festival sponsored by the American Film Institute in 1991.

Hu retrospectives, including “A Touch of Zen” and his 1983 film “All the King’s Men,” toured the United States in 1983 and 1984.

Among Hu’s other films are “Sons of the Good Earth,” “Come Drink With Me,” “Legend of the Mountain,” “Raining in the Mountain,” “Dragon Inn,” “Painted Skin” and “Swordsman.”

When “Swordsman” was shown in Alhambra and Los Angeles in 1990, Thomas called it “a whirlwind of a movie [with] everything you could ask of an action/adventure: fly-through-the-air-with- the-greatest-of-ease combat and swordplay, bravura camera work and music to match the breathtaking acrobatics, fabulous period sets and costumes, speed-of-lightning pacing and nonstop special effects wizardry.”

“More important,” he added, “it has a blithe spirit, a sense of humor, style to burn and a genuine aura of enchanting screen magic.”

Despite Hu’s mastery of the martial arts film, he once told The Times: “I know nothing about kung fu or martial arts.”

Instead, he said, he was far more influenced in his filmmaking by the Peking Opera, which he often attended as a youngster.

Hu said in the mid-1980s that he typically made a film with a budget of no more than $1 million and a shooting schedule of about 40 days. Hu wrote most of his own films.