China's most beautiful person Gong Li, or so the votes say, always knew she wanted to be an actress.
She said even when she was very young, she dreamed of being in movies and practiced her singing and dancing so she could achieve that goal.
Her performing arts practicing, in fact, almost held her back from the chosen career as it kept her from studying her academics. Despite this, she was eventually accepted to the Beijing Central College of Drama in 1985 and graduated successfully four years later.
Her first film, Red Sorghum, award winning at the Berlin Film Festival, was released in 1987.
Li's career took off when she paired up with director Zhang Yimou who cast her as the star in many of his films throughout the 1990s. The two worked together for so long and in such close collaboration, it took a toll on Yimou's marriage when stories about the two being in love started surfacing. By 1995, the stories were proven to be true and too much as Li gave in to the pressure and broke off her scandalous affair. She later married the tobacco tycoon from Singapore Ooi Hoe Soeng and it also marked the end of an era as Yimou stopped working with her. It was not until 2006 that Yimou cast her as a star once more in his film Curse of the Golden Flower. That same year, North America's magazine Premiere ranked Li's performance in Farewell My Concubine as the 89th greatest performance of all time.
Although Li has had limited exposure in Hollywood, she has caught the attention of directors like Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Michael Mann who are said to be admirers of her. The band Red Hot Chili Peppers like her very much as well as they named one of their songs after her.
North American films Li can be seen in include Memoirs of a Geisha, released in 2005.