Word: chen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Chen, 38, need apologize to no one else. Her film, which plays April 11 at the Palm Beach Film Festival and the following week at the Boston Women's Film Festival before opening around the country May 7, is a delicate, harrowing epic in miniature; it has an artist's attention to the harsh allure of physical and psychological landscapes. Xiu Xiu would be memorable if only for its stars: Lu Lu, now 17, an elfin charmer whom Chen found studying English in San Francisco, and the Tibetan actor Lopsang as a herdsman who befriends Xiu Xiu. But the movie...
...film is also exciting as emotional autobiography--a declaration of independence from an artist who felt trapped straddling East and West. "Working with her," says Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast Chen as the spoiled royal wife in the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, "I had the feeling she was somehow in exile, not always comfortable. So I love the idea that my own Empress in exile went back to China as a film director...
...Chen was Xiu Xiu's age during the Cultural Revolution but did not get sent down. "She was one of those people who did everything well," says her friend Yan. With grandparents educated at Oxford and parents educated at Harvard, Chen had the pedigree for success, as well as the stern expectations. Joan's father kept asking what she was going to do with her life. "In my family," Chen says, "going into acting was regarded as strange...
...City as an actress-model. "I was clueless when I arrived," she recalls. "The cultural shock--even the toothpaste tasted different! My desire to go to the States was so vague, yet so strong. It's like going to heaven: you don't plan what happens after you enter." Chen quickly learned what Westerners expected of an Asian woman. On one of her first auditions, she says, "they told me I didn't look Chinese enough, and I was the only Chinese there. I was trying so hard to look like a white woman...
...Chen studied filmmaking at California State University at Northridge and then--lightning strikes again--was seen crossing a parking lot by mogul Dino De Laurentiis. Instantly she had the lead Asian role in his 1985 TV saga Tai-Pan. For more than a decade, Chen was excellent in good movies and amusing in bad ones. In Stanley Kwan's Red Rose, White Rose she is a figure of eros and pathos, driving her lover quietly nuts with her desperate vitality; the turn won her a Hong Kong Film Critics award. Back in the West, she copped a less prestigious prize...