Long the muse of leading Chinese “Fifth Generation” filmmaker Zhang Yimou, Gong Li began her film career when she met the director while in drama school. She and Zhang received considerable international acclaim with their debut, “Red Sorghum” (1987), in which Gong played a meek bride who becomes a powerful woman when she takes over her husband’s winery after his death.
One of China’s leading young stars of the 1980s and 90s, Gong has appeared in films by other directors (“The Empress Dowager” 1988, directed by Li Hanxiang; “The Terra Cotta Warrior”, in which she acted opposite Zhang) but it is in Zhang’s films that she is best known internationally. Slender and demure-looking but possessing a naturalistic verve and strength onscreen, Gong Li embodies a new generation of Chinese women, brought up amid ancient tradition but reaching toward feminist values. In the title role of “Ju Dou” (1990), she played a married woman whose torrid affair with her husband’s nephew brings about tragic consequences, while in “Raise the Red Lantern” (1991) her character also causes trouble as the newest addition to a man’s bevy of wives. Gong Li ventured into comedy with another eponymous heroine in “The Story of Qiu Ju” (1992) as a woman farmer determined to avenge an injustice done to her husband. In 1993, Gong Li starred in a film by another Fifth Generation stalwart, Chen Kaige, “Farewell to My Concubine” which shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes for best picture.
