Run Run Shaw built a Hong Kong movie and TV empire that nurtured rising talent such as actor Chow Yun-fat and director John Woo, inspired Hollywood filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino and produced the 1982 sci-fi classic “Blade Runner.”

Shaw’s prolific studio helped bring kung fu films to the world but he also passed on the chance to sign one of the biggest names in the genre — Bruce Lee.

The missed opportunity was a rare misstep for Shaw, who died yesterday at the age of 107, said a statement from Television Broadcasts Ltd (TVB), a company he helped found in 1967.

No cause of death was given. The statement said Shaw died peacefully at his home in Hong Kong, surrounded by his family.

Shaw Brothers Studios, once among the world’s largest, churned out nearly 1,000 movies and gave young directors like Woo their start. He produced a handful of US films that also included the 1979 disaster thriller “Meteor.”

His television empire, which remains a dominant force in Hong Kong, was where stars like Chow got their first break. Wong Kar-wai, the director behind critically acclaimed movies “Chungking Express” and “In the Mood for Love,” got his start through a TVB training course and worked at the station briefly as a production assistant.

Shaw led TVB until retiring as chairman in December 2011 at the age of 105.

Shaw married twice. His first wife died in 1987. He is survived by his current wife, Mona Fong, two sons and two daughters.

Popularly known as “Luk Suk” or “Sixth Uncle,” Shaw was born the sixth of seven children to a wealthy textile merchant in Ningbo, a city in Shanghai’s neighboring province of Zhejiang.

He started out helping his elder brothers Runje, Runde and Runme set up a silent film studio, Unique Film Production Co, in Shanghai in 1925. The brothers later moved into Hong Kong, making and distributing films to a chain of around 100 cinemas spread across other Asian markets such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

Shaw eventually split from his brothers to set up his own studio in the 1950s dubbed the dream factory, which ushered in a golden era of Hong Kong filmmaking.

After World War II, the company faced growing competition from rivals in Hong Kong and Singapore, so Shaw moved to Hong Kong in the late 1950s to modernize the company. He shifted focus from exhibiting films to producing them and renamed the company Shaw Brothers.

His path to Asian moviemaking dominance began in earnest in 1961 when he opened Movie Town, a vast, state-of-the-art studio in Hong Kong’s rural Clearwater Bay. With 1,500 staffers working on 10 soundstages, Movie Town was reputed to be the most productive studio in the world. At its busiest, actors and directors churned out 40 movies a year, most featuring kung fu, sword fighting or Asian gangsters known as triads.

The result was a library of nearly 1,000 movies such as “The One-Armed Swordsman” and “The Five Fingers of Death,” the latter being one of Shaw’s most successful in the United States.

The studio’s logo — the initials SB on a shield — was inspired by the Warner Brothers emblem, in a nod to its Hollywood aspirations. It came full circle when Tarantino appropriated the Shaw Brothers logo for use in his two “Kill Bill” movies, which were in homage to the studio and other Hong Kong martial arts movies.

“For a year, I’d watch one old Shaw Brothers movie a day — if not three,” Tarantino told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2003.

Films were produced using assembly-line methods and stars and technical staff lived in dormitories on site. Budgets were low and production schedules quick — 35 days to three months, according to a 1976 Time magazine report.

Shaw acknowledged that quality was not his foremost concern. “We’re here to make money,” he told Time. Even Shaw protege Raymond Chow complained about the B-movie quality of the films when he was first hired to work in the publicity department.

“I told Sir Run Run to forget it,” Chow told Asiaweek magazine in 1983. “I said I did not think I could keep my job because the pictures were so bad,” said Chow, whose comments earned him promotion to the production department.

While Shaw didn’t create the kung fu movie, he was quick to capitalize on the genre’s popularity and used a modern studio system and centralized production techniques to pump out films quickly.

In their heyday, Shaw films were reportedly seen by 1.5 million people a week, many in cinemas owned by Shaw and his brothers in southeast Asia.

But the movie mogul failed to spot the potential of the up-and-coming Bruce Lee, who had returned to Hong Kong after a stint in Hollywood. Lee wanted a bigger salary and creative control. But Shaw wouldn’t budge from the standard contract given to all his actors.

Lee signed instead with rival Golden Harvest, founded by Chow to get away from Shaw’s factory-like studio system. Other rising stars, including Jackie Chan, also spurned Shaw’s approach.

Movie audiences moved on to grittier, more contemporary action fare, though Shaw movies still have a solid cult following.

The Shaw film library was eventually sold in 2000 to Celestial Pictures, which has been restoring and re-releasing them.

Film production ceased in 1983, and Shaw switched his focus to television. In 1973 he took control of TVB, which served as a launch pad for talent including Chow, Wong, heartthrob Andy Lau and comedian Stephen Chow.

The broadcaster’s Chinese language channel is also popular in southern China and its programs, many dubbed into other languages, are seen by 300 million households around the world.

Shaw, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974, was also a philanthropist. In 2002 he founded the annual Shaw Prizes, Asia’s version of the Nobel Prizes, offering US$1 million annually in mathematics, medicine and astronomy.

Shaw preferred to stay out of the spotlight and rarely gave interviews. A journalist for the South China Morning Post newspaper recounted mentioning during a 1984 interview that a team fighting leprosy in southwest China had trouble traveling over rugged, mountainous terrain. Shaw immediately decided to donate off-road vehicles but demanded there be no publicity.