Rise and fall of WWE legend turned adult star dubbed ‘Ninth Wonder of the World’

The rise and fall of a WWE star whose life ended in tragedy has been laid bare in a new documentary.

Chyna had gone down a storm when she burst onto the wrestling scene in the late 1990s. And when she hooked up with fellow WWE superstar Triple H (aka Hunter Hearst Helmsley) there seemed to be no stopping her.

But after her relationship with Triple H fell apart and he left her for promoter Vince McMahon’s daughter – her career quickly fell apart.

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Chyna – who was born Joan Marie Laurer in 1969 – made her debut for what was then called the WWF in February 1997 when she emerged from a ringside seat and went for Terri Runnels.

It was an iconic moment that went down in wrestling history.

Billed at 5ft 10 in and 200lbs, she quickly began to dominate the other women in the WWF, and some of the men too.

She was billed as “The Ninth Wonder of the World” and began a run thaat would see her smash records.

She was the first woman to win the company's Intercontinental Championship and was also the first woman to compete in the annual Royal Rumble event.

But despite her initial success – and the start of her relationship with now WWE boss Triple H – her sister Kathy Hamilton said Chyna was insecure about her masculine looks.

“She got a lot of flak for the way that she looked,” Kathy told a new Vice documentary on YouTube.

Kathy added: “She definitely wanted to have more of a feminine appeal, and I think that she felt that the only way she could do that was surgically.”

As well as having implants, Chyna had her jaw reconstructed, claiming that it was to rectify an ‘underbite’ and not because she wanted to appear more feminine.

But Kathy said: “Society likes beautiful women and so she did what she needed to do. That’s kind of when her career just sort of skyrocketed.”

Chyna’s star continued to soar and she even ended up making an appearance in Playboy while still with the WWE. But inside the ring, she felt her career was going backwards when promoter Vince McMahon told her she could fight only women – despite the fact that she’d made a name for herself fighting the blokes.

“For six years I had wrestled men, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t supposed to fight the guys anymore,” she said.

“How was I going to step backwards and wrestle women that didn’t have the experience from the guys that I was wrestling every day?”

And things were also unravelling at home. While Triple H wanted children, Chyna didn't, friends said, and she soon noticed him becoming close with Vince's daughter, Stephanie McMahon.

“His career was moving up and therefore he was having a lot of meetings with Vince and Stephanie,” Chyna said.

Stephanie later recalled: “By the time Triple H and I started our onscreen storyline, we just sort of had great chemistry, and it just went from there.

“One time when I was standing around the ring, he sort of crawled around me. He was on the floor and he felt my leg, and I was like, ‘That’s definitely flirtation there’.”

Chyna confronted Triple H about her suspicions, and it ended with them ‘swiping’ each other before she claimed she found a love letter that Stephanie had sent him a year earlier.

“When I found out, I was devastated,” she said. “It hurt me. I’m a human being, and nobody – whether you’re a celebrity or whether you’re not – likes to be cheated on, especially when it’s with the boss’s daughter.”

Despite Chyna's claims, Triple H doesn't believe he cheated on Chyna and in 2002, said: "There’s a misconception of the way that things ended with us, but it was our relationship had gone downhill.

"There’s a period of time where we were separated and things happened in between and then you kind of partway get back together and it really wasn’t a full-blown relationship at that time."

When Chyna eventually left the WWE in 2001, she claimed to have received the news in a particularly bizarre way.

“I was sitting in a Jerry’s Deli eating lunch and a fax mysteriously went to Jerry’s Deli,” Chyna said.

“It was from the WWE and they said they wouldn’t be needing me anymore.”

And with that, it was as though she was erased from the world of WWE.

That however wasn't to be the end of Chyna's story. While she loosely continued her in-ring career with a brief stint in Japan, it was her life outside the squared circle that was attracting more attention.

After leaving the WWE, she did a second Playboy shoot and also became involved in a messy, on-again, off-again relationship with fellow wrestler Sean Waltman, better known as X-Pac.

And it was that relationship that would spark one of the most controversial moments of her life. In 2004, the pair released a sex tape dubbed '1 Night in China', a play on the Paris Hilton sex tape of a similar name. It sold over 100,000 copies and saw Chyna start a new sideline to her career.

She starred in a second adult film in 2009, 'Another Night in China', along with a professional porn movie in 2011. She later said she never really wanted that as a career but was "making lemonade out of lemons" after the release of the first racy movie.

Alongside the sex tapes came her drug issues. She admitted her life had been "spinning out of control" when she made the tape with Waltman and despite stints in rehab, it became a recurring issue that saw her lose many of the relationships she'd built, including with her own family.

Tragically, in 2016, she was found dead by her manager. A post-mortem examination revealed she’d overdosed on alcohol, combined anxiety drugs, painkillers and sleeping tablets.

It was an early end for a superstar who’d reached the pinnacle of her profession but had been no match for the forces behind the scenes.

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