Biografia

Her grandfather was a famous Shanghai pharmacologist. He protested the Cultural Revolution by swallowing a fatal dose of cyanide at a public meeting, after he was wrongly accused of being a counterrevolutionary and a foreign spy.

Became a US citizen at age 28.

She has been called "China's Elizabeth Taylor" for achieving stardom while still a teenager, and "China's Meryl Streep" for her ability to move beyond the role of ingénue and portray strong and complex female characters.

Chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the world.

Director David Lynch said of her: "She's the best thing from China since pasta - and much more beautiful".

There are only so many roles as empresses . . . but I've had a lot of offers to play vampires.

My life is good. Often I look for someone to thank.

When you see me walking out here, wearing gorgeous clothes, remember these evening gowns are really just my work clothes, they go with hyping the movies.

On Sino-US relations - We need to be open-minded and farsighted. We need to make more friends than enemies.

I remember thinking how I had never seen a film like Edward Mãos de Tesoura (1990) when I first watched it in 1990. It was unique cinema that felt like pure magic. The bizarre beauty of the film and the gentle hero with his lethally sharp scissorhands stayed with me through out the years. Looking back, after almost 20 years, I now understand better the fierce longing and intense loneliness that the film had stirred in me. Like the protagonist, Edward, I was the shy, misunderstood outsider for a large part of my life in America, and again later in China. Having experienced the adulation of the millions in my late teens, I became a much reviled traitor, who brought shame to China after leaving for the US and later for playing the part of the mistress to the white man in Tai-Pan (1986). The capricious and precarious nature of the mob sentiments was a nightmare, which I knew well. I empathize with the conflicting desire of the artist to retreat to his lonely tower and to be loved by people who appreciate his talent. - (Singapore Sun Film Festival, October 2009)