Bai Ling

Bai Ling
Bai Ling in 2007
Chinese name	白靈 (traditional)
Chinese name	白灵 (simplified)
Pinyin	Bái Líng (Mandarin)
Born	(1966-10-10) October 10, 1966[1] [2] Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1981–present
Parents	Bai Yuxiang (白玉祥) Chen Binbin (陳彬彬)
Awards Hong Kong Film Awards Best Supporting Actress 2004 Dumplings Golden Bauhinia Awards Best Supporting Actress 2004 Dumplings Golden Horse Awards Best Supporting Actress 2004 Dumplings

Bai Ling (Chinese: 白灵, born October 10, 1966)^[1] is a Chinese-American actress known for her work in films such as The Crow, Red Corner, Crank: High Voltage, Three... Extremes, Wild Wild West, Anna and the King and Southland Tales, as well as TV shows including Entourage and Lost.

Early life

Bai was born in Chengdu, People's Republic of China. Her father, Bai Yuxiang (白玉祥), was a musician in the People's Liberation Army, and later a music teacher. Her mother, Chen Binbin (陈彬彬), was a dancer, stage actress, and a literature teacher in Sichuan University; Bai's maternal grandfather was a military officer of the Kuomintang army, and thus was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. In the early 1980s, Bai Ling's parents divorced, and later remarried. Her mother remarried to the writer Xu Chi (徐迟), renowned for his report titled Goldbach's Conjecture, about Chinese mathematician Chen Jingrun. Bai Ling has one older sister Bai Jie (白洁), who works for the Chinese tax bureau, and a younger brother Bai Chen (白陈), who emigrated to Japan and works for an American company.

Bai has described herself as a very shy child who found that she best expressed herself through acting and performing. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), she learned how to perform by participating in Eight model plays, at her elementary school shows. After her graduation from middle school, Bai was sent to do labor work at Shuangliu (双流), a county near Chengdu, where the Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport is located.

She soon passed the People's Liberation Army's exams, and became an artist soldier in Nyingchi Prefecture, Tibet, where she served from age 14 to 17. Her main activity there was entertaining in the musical theater. She also served briefly as an Army nurse. Ling later stated that during her time in Tibet she, along with other female performers, was regularly plied with alcohol and sexually abused by older male officers, including one instance of rape that led to a pregnancy, which she was forced to terminate with an abortion. She cites this period of sexual abuse for her subsequent struggles with alcohol addiction.^[3] Subsequently, Bai spent some time in a mental hospital.

Soon after her release from the hospital, Bai joined People's Art Theater of Chengdu, and became a professional actress. Her performance as a young man in the stage play Yueqin and Little Tiger drew the attention of movie director Teng Wenji (滕文骥), which gained her her first movie role in On The Beach (1985), as a village girl who becomes a factory worker and struggled against her father's will for her to marry her cousin.

In later years, she appeared in several movies. She temporarily moved to New York in 1991 to attend New York University's film department as a visiting scholar, but later obtained a special visa that allowed her to remain in the United States until she became a citizen in 1999.

Acting career

At a party in July 2007

Bai began her acting career in China, appearing in several Chinese feature films. In 1984, she made her film debut as a fishing village girl in the movie On the Beach (海滩). Later she filmed several other movies, including Suspended Sentence (缓期执行), Yueyue (月月), Tears in Suzhou (泪洒姑苏) without much attention. She became famous after playing a girl with a psychological disorder who has an affair with her doctor, in the film The Shining Arc (弧光) directed by Zhang Junzhao (张军钊), her most highly acclaimed role in the Chinese film industry. In 1991, Bai moved to the United States, where she appeared in a number of American films and television shows.

Bai's first major American film role was in The Crow (1994), where she played the half-sister/lover of the main villain, Top Dollar. In 1997, she played the lead female role, opposite Richard Gere, in the American film Red Corner. The New York Times praised Bai Ling's performance, saying that she gave the film "not only grace but also substantial gravity".^[4] For her role in Red Corner, she received the National Board of Review Freedom for Breakthrough Female Performance and the San Diego Film Critics Society Award for Best Actress.^[5] The film was critical of human rights abuse in China, and as a result, Bai Ling's Chinese citizenship was revoked. She later became a US citizen.^[6]

Bai was named one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" in 1998. She shaved off her hair, which was longer than 36 inches (90 cm) for her role in Anna and the King, and is widely known in Thailand as "Tuptim", her character's name from the film, even though the movie is officially banned because of its depiction of the King of Siam. She filmed scenes for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) as Senator Bana Breemu, but her role was cut during editing. She claimed that this was because she posed nude in the June 2005 issue of Playboy magazine, whose appearance on newsstands coincided with the movie's May 2005 release, but director George Lucas denied this, stating that the cut had been made more than a year earlier.^[7] Her scenes were included in the "deleted scenes" feature of the DVD release.

In 2004, Bai starred in independent filmmaker Fruit Chan's Dumplings and the performance earned her the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Supporting Actress. In the same year, she has been critically accaimed for her performance in another independent movie, The Beautiful Country, with Nick Nolte, by Hans Petter Moland.

Later in 2005, Bai was member of the official jury at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival. Off the screen she was a cast member on the VH1 program called But Can They Sing?. Also in 2005, Bai guest-starred in season 2 of Entourage, in which she played a lover of Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier).

In 2007, she starred as Coco in the film adaptation of the controversial Chinese contemporary novel, Shanghai Baby, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival, and also guest-starred in one episode ("Stranger in a Strange Land") of the show Lost. Since 2007, she has appeared in a number of films including Love Ranch, Crank: High Voltage and A Beautiful Life, although she became more well known for her red carpet appearances and outrageous fashions ^[8]

In 2013, Bai enjoyed a career resurgence with the movie The Gauntlet, which earned her the Best Actress awards at the Los Angeles Cinema Festival of Hollywood and at 2014 Asians On Film Festival. Also, for Speed Dragon she received the Best Feature Film Award at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival. In late 2014 Bai starred along with David Arquette in The Key, a Jefery Levy's adaptation of the famous novel by Nobel Prize laureate Junichiro Tanizaki. In October 2014, Bai Ling was a member of the jury in the "India Gold 2014" section of the Mumbai Film Festival.

Personal life

On February 14, 2008, Bai Ling was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport for shoplifting two magazines and a package of batteries.^[9] It was an "emotionally crazy" day, Bai explained to E! News. She was coping with the "huge problem of breaking up [before] Valentine's Day...wrong boyfriend."^[10] She also wrote on her blog after the incident: "Life happens to you whether you like it or not, sometimes I feel you have to be so brave to stand in front of the world, and just hope that people will have a tender heart towards you."^[11] On March 5, 2008 she pleaded guilty to the charge of disturbing the peace. She was fined $200 (US$700 including the fine and penalties).^[12]

In a 2009 interview, Bai claimed that she is from the moon, where her grandmother lives. "I'm not really in reality. I'm in my own universe and my mind is a million miles somewhere else," she stated, further explaining, "Why I feel like I come from the moon is because my mother told me I was found somewhere." She believes that when she looks up at the moon, she can often spot her grandmother there, still living in her childhood home.^[13]

Regarding her public image and troubles over the years, she stated:

I accidentally or innocently destroyed the beautiful Bai Ling that everybody loved, that beautiful, talented actress. Instead, the media brought me out as this crazy slut showing her nipples everywhere. I become this character the pop culture Hollywood machine created. Somehow, I become a victim to that image.^[14]

In 2011, she appeared in the fifth season of the VH1 reality television series Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which documented her recovery from alcohol addiction.^[15]

Bai is openly bisexual.^[16][17]

Filmography

Discography

Singles

• "Rehab" (2011)^[18]
• "U Touch Me, I Don't Know U" (2011)^[19]
• "I Love U My Valentine" (2012)^[20]
• "Tuesday Night 8pm" (2012)^[21]

Music videos

• "Rehab" (2011)^[22]
• "U Touch Me, I Don't Know U" (2011)^[23]
• "I Love U My Valentine" (2012)^[24]
• "Tuesday Night 8pm" (2012)^[25]

References

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bai Ling.

• Official website
• Bai Ling at Playboy Online
• Bai Ling at the Internet Movie Database
• Bai Ling at AllMovie