Gong Li

Gong Li (born December 31, 1965, Shenyang, Liaoning province, China) is a popular Chinese actress, widely associated with movies by Chinese director Zhang Yimou but perhaps best known to a broad Western audience for her role as a 1930s Japanese geisha in the film Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).

Gong was the youngest of five children in a family of academics. In 1985 she was admitted to the prestigious Central Drama Academy in Beijing. It was during her second year there that director Zhang Yimou, who was interviewing young actresses for the part of the rebellious young bride in Hong gaoliang (1987; Red Sorghum), noticed her. She not only won the role but she also won the director’s heart. Her romance with Zhang (who was still married at the time) both scandalized and delighted fans throughout East Asia, and Red Sorghum went on to become a major hit at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival.

Zhang’s and Gong’s careers grew together, with Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991). In each of these films, Gong played a spirited young woman forced into marriage. She was soon wooed by Hong Kong producers and landed her first comic role in Terra-Cotta Warrior (1990), in which she is pursued throughout the centuries by a faithful lover, played by Zhang. She also appeared in parodic gangster movies, light-hearted dramas, and kung fu comedies.

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It was with mainland directors, however, that she did what is usually considered her best work. In Zhang’s Qiu Ju da guansi (1992; Qiu Ju Goes to Court, also known as The Story of Qiu Ju) she played a decidedly unglamorous country wife, who, though heavily pregnant during most of the film, stubbornly wages a fight against the local bureaucracy. The film was a triumph at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the Golden Lion and Gong received the best actress award. In Chen Kaige’s Bawang bie ji (1993; Farewell, My Concubine), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1993, she was cast as a shrewd, single-minded yet sensitive prostitute who gets her man and forces him out of an ambiguous relationship with a fellow male opera singer but is betrayed by him during the Cultural Revolution. In 1994 Zhang’s Huozhe (To Live), which covered the life of a couple between the 1940s and the 1970s, allowed her to explore new dimensions of her art: not only does she age significantly but she also evolves from the long-suffering wife of a patrician gambler to an energetic peasant woman with a whimsical husband and two children and finally to a doting grandmother who has found peace in her old age. Through her many roles portraying modern, independent females, Gong came to symbolize the new Chinese woman.

After 1995 Gong parted ways with Zhang, both personally and professionally. She then played a concubine spy in Chen’s Jing Ke ci Qinwang (1998; The Emperor and the Assassin) and a woman caught between two lovers in director Zhou Sun’s Zhou Yu de huoche (2002; Zhou Yu’s Train). One of her best-known roles was that of the elder geisha Hatsumomo in the visually stunning Memoirs of a Geisha. A product of Hollywood, the film was banned by the Chinese government in 2006 over fears that a Chinese actress portraying a Japanese character would cause outrage and stir existing anti-Japanese sentiment. Gong reunited with Zhang for Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia (2006; Curse of the Golden Flower), in which she portrayed an empress attempting to combat her husband’s efforts to murder her.

Gong’s other American films included Miami Vice (2006) and Hannibal Rising (2007). In the poorly reviewed noir Shanghai (2010), Gong glittered as a gangster’s girlfriend who falls in love with an American spy (John Cusack). Gong then starred in the romantic comedy Wo zhi nüren xin (2011; I Know a Woman’s Heart), a Chinese remake of the American film What Women Want (2000). She again teamed with Zhang on Gui lai (2014; Coming Home), in which she depicted the struggles of a woman whose husband is imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution and whose ambitious ballerina daughter turns him in to the authorities when he escapes. Gong’s later films included the fantasy adventure Xi you ji zhi: Sun Wukong san de Baigu Jing (2016; The Monkey King 2) and the Disney movie Mulan (2020).