- The Observer, Sunday July 23 2000
Director plucks actress out of nowhere and she decides he is going to make her a star as well as his lover. It is a story as old as the movies, but it comes in slightly different guises, ranging from the momentous (Von Sternberg meets Dietrich) to the bathetic (John Derek meets Bo). Zhang Yimou's encounter with Gong Li falls into the grander side of that tradition.
An experienced cinematographer, Zhang chose Gong - still an acting student - to star in his directorial debut, Red Sorghum (1987). It became the first mainland Chinese film to get a commercial release in the United States and launched the wave of stately Technicolor epics that made China the flavour of the Nineties on the arthouse circuit. And almost all of the big Chinese films of the time - Raise The Red Lantern (1991), Farewell My Concubine (1993) and To Live (1994) - starred Gong.
Many were made with the tacit assumption that they would be banned at home but could provide the state with useful export dollars. By the time she broke up with Zhang in 1995 - after the Thirties gangster movie Shanghai Triad (1995), Gong was the most famous Chinese actress ever outside China and had won a Best Actress award at Venice for Zhang's The Story Of Qui Ju (1992).
But while Zhang's most recent film - Not One Less - is a gritty film about rural poverty made with non-professional actors, Gong's latest - The Emperor and the Assassin - is, unsurprisingly, a big historical movie.
This one goes back further into the past, to the time of the first emperor, and Gong plays the woman torn between the ruler and the man sent to kill him. She is not yet about to drop a winning formula.
She was born in Shenyang in 1965. Her father taught economics at university. She turned to acting only when her singing failed to get her into music school. It was two years later that Zhang came calling.
Out of costume, she seems nothing like the long-suffering symbol of China's sorrows she embodies on film. She's blunt, laying into her adopted home town of Hong Kong: 'The climate here is too humid and there are not many friends here. Most people don't talk about the arts.'
She moved to the philistine island-city to live with Ooi Wei Ming, the tobacco executive she married in 1996. As well as acting, she models for L'Oreal and has said: 'I can spend a whole day choosing cosmetics.'
And she takes the usual celebrity gripes just a little further than most, wanting draconian action taken against the tabloids. 'These should not be ordinary sanctions, but strict sanctions, like closing down the newspaper.'
As for Hollywood, she has never ruled it out. In 1997 she starred with Jeremy Irons in the English-language Chinese Box , a drama set during the Hong Kong handover - that's as close as she's got. She is currently looking for a script to do with Richard Gere. But she is in no rush. After all, when you are the biggest star to emerge from the world's most populous country, the US doesn't seem that big a deal.
Five things you should know about Gong Li
1 She recorded an album of Madonna songs.
2 The French government gave her the status of Officer des Arts et Lettres in 1998 for contributions to the cinema.
3 The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a song called Gong Li named after her.
4 Despite the success of Red Sorghum , she stayed on at Beijing's Central Drama Academy to graduate in 1989.
5 She was on the jury at the 1997 Cannes film festival.
• The Emperor and the Assassin opened on Friday.
