Word: zhao
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...must have been particularly moved: he hired Zhao to star in a movie, Nu Er Gu (Penitentiary Angel). "My performance was pretty terrible." says Zhao, "but if you've been in a film by a famous director, no matter how well you did, then other less-famous directors will want...
...Filming the series was a sweatshop grind. "We shot 18 to 20 hours a day," Zhao recalls. "There were two groups of actors. One shot during the day, one at night. Frequently I'd have to do both. A few times I worked so hard that I actually threw up from the exertion. But I was young then. I didn't get tired easily. And I never complained about the working conditions. I thought that's just how it was supposed to be. Now I know that's wrong. But at the time I had no clue. Whatever they...
...with the star-is-born recognition she got from Princess Pearl, Zhao had a rare lapse into self-approval: "The show had the highest ratings in the country. So I said very confidently to myself, 'in China I've already gone as far as I can go in television. It's time to try something new.'" Hong Kong was waiting for her, with featured roles in Andrew Lau's The Duel (as a spoiled princess) and Jeff Lau's Chinese Odyssey 2002 (this time her makeover was from mannish to femme...
...Stephen Chow, her director and co-star in Shaolin Soccer, who showed Zhao she still had much to learn. "I wanted a challenge," she says, "and he really gave it to me. In China people think I'm cute; he didn't let me look cute. People say I have big eyes; he taped them down. My old characters were all kind of wild; here I was very subdued. Everything I did before, he reversed." She also learned to pay new attention to the camera. "I'd gotten so used to it, doing TV shows, that I'd started...
...relationship with the camera may still be fresh, but Zhao has had her troubles. Her rapport with mainland movie audiences was badly strained in 2001 when a fashion magazine published a photo of her wearing a dress with a pattern that resembled a Japanese flag from World War II. During a concert shortly after the photo appeared, Zhao was attacked and smeared with feces by Fu Shenghua, a construction worker whose grandparents were killed during Japan's wartime occupation of China. "I know what I did wasn't right," Fu told China's Da Gong magazine. "But I believe...