Celebrity Biographies
Maggie Q.
Exotic face, slender figure, Maggie Q is a model and actress, who has achieved great popularity especially thanks to the television series of which “Nikita” is a good sample, of which she was the absolute protagonist, and “Designated Successor”.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1979, the data could be misleading, because her very personal oriental-type features come from a singular miscegenation, since her father has Polish and Irish ancestors, while her mother is Vietnamese. Precisely her parents met in Vietnam, the place where he was assigned, in the middle of the war, love in wartime. She is the youngest of five siblings, two from a previous marriage of her mother. Although very feminine, she says that she liked playing with robots like C3PO more than with Barbie dolls.
Her real name was Margaret Denise Quigley, that of Maggie Q she would adopt in Hong Kong –they had trouble pronouncing “Quigley” there, although anyone would say that Q was a Bondian nickname that foreshadowed her action roles–, when she had embarked on a modeling career, thanks to his spectacular physique, cultivated with his love of cross-country races and swimming, which earned him a scholarship to study at a private university.
Although he enrolled in veterinary medicine, his studies did not materialize, partly due to the poor financial situation of his family, which forced him to earn a living on his own, leaving at the age of 17 for Japan, Taiwan and then Hong Kong. In any case, she was well impressed with her love for animals: not only is she a vegetarian, but through PETA she advocates for their protection, involved in numerous campaigns for the association.
Her photogenicity and a rising modeling career made it possible for her to try her luck on screen as an actress, despite lacking any experience in this regard. It was Jackie Chan , a specialist in action movies and martial arts, who opted for Maggie’s qualities, which could do well on screen. So that in 2001 she could be seen briefly in Rush Hour 2 and in 2004 in Around the World in 80 Days . And it is that before the popular actor had seen her in Hong Kong, as she had appeared in the popular series House of Dragon , and in the thriller Lethal Experiment; and without knowing Cantonese, he had to say his phrases by learning them phonetically. In addition, despite her good physical shape, she confessed to having no idea of martial arts, and she claimed to lack elasticity, but the important thing was to have determination and be willing to work hard.
It could have been relegated to brief exotic roles, even if it was in flashy franchises, it’s not just anything to work in a film with Tom Cruise , Mission Impossible III (2006) and Bruce Willis, The Jungle 4.0 (2007). But the transfer of the character of Nikita from the French Luc Besson to the Anglo-Saxon world allowed her to play the lethal assassin for four seasons, between 2010 and 2013. That was permanent work, and while she could always continue with small supporting roles in minor films, such as El Hitman of God
He was not the main character, far from it, but being a fixed character in the dystopian youth saga Divergent with its sequels Insurgent and Loyal (2014, 2015 and 2016) was a hoot, his career was consolidating. And TV kept knocking on her door, because she was perfect as a slender action character, so she did Stalker – a police series about stalkers in which she met her husband, the actor Dylan McDermott – and above all Designated Successor , where she is a FBI agent investigating the conspiracy that has liquidated the president of the United States and the entire leadership in a terrorist attack on the Capitol.