Bai Ling Biography

Name : Bai Ling

Date of Birth : 10 October 1966, Chengdu, China

Height : 5' 3" (1.60 m)

Occupation : Actress

Born in the Szechwan province of China in 1966, Ling Bai began her show business career when she was in grade school with the school choir. When she was 14, she enlisted in the Chinese People's Liberation Army where she spent three years in a performance troop entertaining soldiers stationed in Tibet.

Bai Ling found that she could express herself through acting so after her rocovery she joined a theater group in Beijing, where she appeared in traditional Chinese plays as well as ramas from the West. Soon she caught the eye of a number of progressive and traditional Chinese director and began receiving small roles in Chinese films. In 1988, Ling starred in Hu Guang (a.k.a. Arc Light), where she played a woman suffering from mental illness. The next year, she took part in the infamous Tiananmen Square protests, which further alienated her from the Chinese goverment. When she attended the film's screening at the Moscow Film Festival she was warned not to discuss political matters.

Bai Ling means "white spirit" in her Chinese dialect and she has become a rising actress on both sides of the Pacific. The delicate, almost ethereal actress was particularly memorable to USA audiences as Myca, the drug-pushing cannibal with a taste for eyeballs, in Alex Proyas' thriller "The Crow" (1994) and as the President's Chinese interpreter in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (1995). The latter role was almost ironic as Bai Ling had arrived in the USA just four years earlier not knowing one word of English.

At age 21 Ling traveled to New York City to study at New York University's Department of Film and took classes at the Strasberg Institute. Bai Ling arrived in New York not knowing a word of English, but soon mastered the language through daily immersion. She was issued a special visa and allowed to stay in the United States due to her actions at Tiananmem Square. She make her American film debut as the villainous Myca in the dark fantasy The Crow. The following year she played a Chinese interpreter in Oliver Stone's Nixon. In 1997 she appeared in Red Corner as a lawyer defending an American journalist (Richard Gere) on assignment in China, although she knew she would suffer repercussions from her participation. Red Corner was banned in China and North Corea, her contracts in upcoming Chinese films canceled, and her passport was revoked. However, the National Board of Review gave her a Breakthough Performance award; and was gave her U.S. citizenship in 1999.