Celebrity Biographies
Zhang Ziyi
With features as delicate as Chinese porcelain, she combines the fragility of Audrey Hepburn with the rebellious attitude of Katharine Hepburn. She has shown that she is much more than an oriental beauty, and downplays her stunning looks. “In China, we don’t consider a person really beautiful until we’ve known them for a long time and then we know what’s behind their façade,” she said. In these parts she is known as Zhang Ziyi, although she has asked the Western media to call her in the Eastern style, that is, Ziyi Zhang, placing her last name first and then her first name. Her friends simplify her and simply call her ‘Z’. At 27 years old, she ZZ she tops the top of the most well-known Chinese stars in the world.
Born in Beijing on February 9, 1979, the same day as Mena Suvari, ZZ was the second daughter of Yuanxiao and Zhousheng, an economist and a kindergarten teacher respectively. During her childhood, she was a mischievous and restless girl. To instill some discipline in her, and concerned about her eating disorders, her parents enrolled her in a dance school at the age of 9. Her dance was so good that shortly after she passed the entrance exam at the Peking Dance School, one of the most prestigious in the world. The intense work day began at five and almost always lasted until eleven at night, so ZZ came to hate school, and even ran away on one occasion. “The atmosphere was quite competitive. Everyone was fighting for the professor’s leadership and affection. All of that was quite incompatible with my personality. Besides, I think I’m a pretty mediocre dancer.”
At 16, ZZ realized that dancing was not her true calling, and she enrolled in the China Central School of Dramatic Art. Before finishing her studies, she attended a casting organized to choose the protagonist of a shampoo ad. There she met Zhang Yimou , the most distinguished representative of the Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema. If she is difficult to be chosen in an audition in the West, things are more complicated in China, where the population is spectacularly high: more than 40,000 applicants showed up for the audition. Still, ZZ stood out from her and Yimou decided to make her the lead in The Way Home ., one of his best dramas. It seems that Yimou has earned her prestige from her, and he is a demanding director, so he asked the actress for constant rehearsals, and she did not hesitate to constantly yell at him when she was wrong. Even so, she keeps a good memory of her mentor. “He made me improve and progress, in his own way. I will never be thankful enough. Even though it was tough, he cared for me,” she recalls. In the end, ZZ’s convincing work as the feisty peasant girl who fell in love with the teacher left Yimou so enthusiastic that he himself recommended her to his friend, the Taiwanese Ang Lee , when he found out that he was looking for an actress for Tigre . & Dragon . Although Lee had initially thought of an established performer, such as Chow Yun-Fat andMichelle Yeoh , the other protagonists, ended up betting on ZZ, who stole the hearts of moviegoers around the world, at the same time that her character, the governor’s daughter, stole the central character’s sword.
The repercussion of a film that restored dignity to action cinema gave ZZ some popularity, which was claimed by Hollywood, although she was reluctant to accept roles in the mecca of cinema, for not speaking English. The first one who signed her was Brett Ratner in Rush Hour 2 : she convinced him of her because almost all her phrases were in Mandarin. The film paired ZZ with Jackie Chan , one of the girl’s idols. He overprotected her during the filming of her like her older brother, and gave her a lot of advice on movie stardom. And although even Chan’s fans admit that it is one of her worst films, it was a box office success. Next, she was offered two other Chinese action blockbusters, Zu Warriorsand Musa the Warrior , who stuck to second-rate imitations of Tiger & Dragon . The one who was not bad at imitating Ang Lee was Zhang Yimou himself, who recruited ZZ again for Hero and The House of Flying Daggers , spectacular martial arts films that gave him more success than ever. And although at that point in her career, she was in danger of being pigeonholed in action movies, Wong Kar-Wai, the genius director from Hong Kong, offered her a very different role, that of a long-suffering prostitute, in 2046 . . “Actually, what I like are dramas and tragedies,” she said at the time.
When Rob Marshall , director of Chicago , proposed to ZZ to star in Memoirs of a Geisha , she was not at all clear. But she had already studied some English, and she dared to accept the role. “I was terrified of filming in that language, because it’s not mine, and that gives me a strange feeling. I had been told that language is a great barrier for an actor, and that it is impossible to get deeply into the skin of a character if you speak in someone else’s language. In the end, I have been very satisfied with the experience”, declared the actress. Criticism rained down on Marshall, due to his decision to hire ZZ, together with the mythical Gong Li (Yimou’s first muse) and Michelle Yeoh (who was reuniting with ZZ afterTiger and Dragon ), that is to say three Chinese actresses to embody Japanese geishas. But her detractors do not lose sleep over her. “The role of Sayuri is so appealing that any actress would have accepted it, no matter what country she was from,” she commented.