7 Chinese Actresses You Should Know Inline

  • Chinese actress Anna May Wong
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    Anna May Wong

    This great star of the twenties and thirties doesn’t belong on this list, and not only because she’s not a contemporary actress. Although ethnically Chinese (née Wong Liu Tsong) and widely seen as “foreign” and “exotic,” Wong was actually a third-generation American born in Los Angeles. More than any other, actress she came to embody Western clichés of China and Asia—dangerous dragon ladies, riffs on Madame Butterfly. Although she fought racial (and racist) stereotyping, she became a cultural symbol of the Mysterious East known for her fashion sense. Her costumes still define and inspire what many think of as Chinese style.

    MOVIES TO SEE: The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Piccadilly (1929), Shanghai Express (1932)

  • Chinese actress Brigitte Lin
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    Brigitte Lin

    Born Lin Ching Hsia, this Taiwanese superstar was renowned for her extraordinary panache in gender-fluid roles. Lin played everything from tomboys to men slowly turning into women to a pair of siblings (one female, one male). She could also be funny, as in her great blonde-wigged turn in Chungking Express, maybe the best romantic comedy of the past quarter-century. And boy, could she move.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Peking Opera Blues (1986), Swordsman II (1991), The Bride with White Hair (1993), Chungking Express (1994)

  • Chinese actress Maggie Cheung
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    Photo: Rune Hellestad/Corbis Images
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    Maggie Cheung

    Born in Hong Kong, educated in England, and once married to French film director Olivier Assayas, she is the most cosmopolitan of modern Chinese actresses. She may also be the most versatile, shining in everything from Jackie Chan comedies to European art films to HK tearjerkers to biopics—she’s great as legendary silent film star Ruan Lingyu. Over the years, Cheung went from an awkward beauty to a brilliant screen actress, whose Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love is one of modern cinema’s defining roles.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Days of Being _Wild (_1990), Center Stage (1991), Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996), In the Mood for Love (2000)

  • Chinese actress Gong Li
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    Gong Li

    When movies from the Mainland began hitting the West in the mid-eighties, they needed a face for the public to connect to. It belonged to Gong, who isn’t merely astonishingly beautiful and charismatic—I still remember everyone oohing and aahing at her sheer force during a Vogue photo shoot—but one of the greatest and deepest-souled actresses anywhere in the world. A famous director once told me that Gong Li giving twenty percent is better than most other actresses at their very best.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Red Sorghum (1987), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), “The Hand” episode of Eros (2004)

  • Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi
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    Photo: Adam Knott/Corbis Images
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    Zhang Ziyi

    This graceful Beijing-born performer wowed the West with her feisty Jen Yu in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a performance that helped make it by far the most successful foreign movie ever to play in American theaters. A protégé of director Zhang Yimou (who also discovered Gong Li), she went on to show her skill as a dramatic actress in her heartbreaking work as a party girl in Wong Kar Wai’s great 2046. I once spent several days traveling with Zhang in Greece for a story, and she not only agreed to every stranger’s request for a photo, she looked ravishing in every single one.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), 2046 (2004), House of Flying Daggers (2004), The Grandmaster (2013)

  • Chinese actress Shu Qi
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    Shu Qi

    If Chinese movies have a Marilyn Monroe, it’s this Taiwan-born actress who started off doing soft-core films, against all the odds in a very traditional culture, and worked her way to becoming a huge movie star and celebrity spokesperson for Kenzo and Emporio Armani. With a sexiness at once funny and vulnerable, she’s starred in Chinese mega-hits and Transporter pictures, and served as muse for Hou Hsiao-hsien, perhaps the most refined art film director in the world, who created one of cinema’s most thrilling shots simply by following her as she walked across an overpass.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Viva Erotica (1996), Millennium Mambo (2001), Three Times (2005), If You Are the One (2008)

  • Chinese actress Zhao Wei
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    Zhao Wei

    Although Fan Bingbing is often called China’s most popular actress—oodles of endorsements, a role in X-Men: Days of Future Past—she’s more successful than substantial. The real powerhouse is Zhao, another hugely popular movie and TV star who’s also a film director (her generational portrait So Young became one of China’s all time biggest hits), a business magnate (buying a $400 million share in the Chinese juggernaut Alibaba’s film unit), and a blogger with millions of followers. Oh, yes, she’s also a big-time pop star. If any performer’s career can stand as a metaphor for China’s explosion into modernity and wealth, it’s surely hers.

    MOVIES TO SEE: Shaolin Soccer (2001), So Close (2002), Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (2009), So Young (2013)