Sino Celeb is a monthly feature where we introduce a Chinese celebrity to our readers.
We’ve always admired this Wenzhou-born actress. Though raised in an artistic family (her mom was a stage actress and dad a painter), Tang Wei never planned to enter the entertainment industry, claiming law and archeology once topped her list of potential careers instead.
When side work in modeling eventually propelled her to study at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, she majored in directing, not acting. Then, just four years after graduation, Tang was selected from more than 10,000 actresses to star in Ang Lee’s erotic thriller Lust, Caution (2007) as a Chinese student recruited to seduce a Japanese-allied official as part of an assassination plot.
Her performance won her global acclaim (including a Trophée Chopard at the 51st Cannes Film Festival), but the Chinese State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) deemed her steamy sex scenes a little too hot and subsequently banned all mainland broadcasters and newspapers from showing or printing images of Tang, abruptly halting her career just as it was beginning to take off.
So Tang Wei flew to the UK, where she enrolled in drama courses at the University of Reading and allegedly performed as a street artist in her spare time.
When the SARFT finally judged her ‘cool’ enough to return to China, Tang Wei went on to star in a handful of films between 2010 and 2016, including box office hit Finding Mr. Right, filmed in Vancouver, Canada.
The film, in which Tang Wei plays a young Chinese woman who travels to Seattle on a tourist visa when pregnant in order to give birth in the States and (illegally) obtain American citizenship for her child, drew fresh attention to the issue of birth tourism. Watch it on iQiyi.com.
Kind of like: Sharon Stone after Basic Instinct
Famous for: being banned from mainland media in 2007
See her next in: Long Day's Journey Into Night (2017)
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