Zhang Ziyi(Chinese: 章子怡; born 9 February 1979)

Biography

Zhang Ziyi was born in Beijing on 9 February 1979, the daughter of Zhang Yuanxiao, an accountant who later became an economist, and Li Zhousheng, a kindergarten teacher. She has an older brother, Zhang Zinan, who managed her early career.

Zhang began studying folk dance at eight. At eleven, on her parents' suggestion, she was sent to board at the affiliated secondary school of the Beijing Dance Academy — an experience she disliked intensely, watching classmates compete for the teachers' favor, so much that she ran away from the school once. She stayed on regardless, and in 1994 won the National Taoli Cup dance competition.

At seventeen, Zhang was admitted to the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. In her freshman year, she made her acting debut in the television film Touching Starlight (1996).

Two years later, while still a student, she was cast by director Zhang Yimou in The Road Home (1999), playing a village girl in love with the town's new schoolteacher. The role made Zhang Ziyi, at twenty, the youngest actress ever to win Best Actress at the Hundred Flowers Awards.

International fame followed the very next year, with Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000): Zhang played Jen Yu, a governor's daughter secretly trained in martial arts who runs away rather than accept an arranged marriage. The film's crossover success in the West carried Zhang Ziyi with it — straight into Hollywood.

She made her American film debut playing a villain opposite Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2 (2001), followed the next year by Hero (2002), which reunited her with Zhang Yimou alongside Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung, and earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations.

For House of Flying Daggers (2004), again directed by Zhang Yimou, Zhang Ziyi played a blind dancer and warrior, spending two months living alongside an actual blind girl to prepare, and sang the film's theme song herself. That same year, in Wong Kar-wai's 2046, she played a struggling prostitute in a performance critics praised for its "expressive" restraint, winning Best Actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

In 2005 she took the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha, playing the Japanese geisha Sayuri — casting that stirred real controversy in China, where a Chinese actress portraying a celebrated symbol of Japan, in a story set during the era of Japan's wartime aggression against China, struck many as a discomfiting choice. 

The film was a hit in the West regardless, earning Zhang nominations at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. That same year, Time named her one of its 100 Most Influential People and dubbed her "China's gift to Hollywood." Of the roles that fame had opened up to her, she was choosy: "I got a lot of offers, but I turned them down because they were all victim roles," she told Interview magazine in 2006.

Off screen, Zhang was becoming just as recognizable on the world's fashion stages. She was the first Chinese woman named an ambassador for Emporio Armani, a post she held from 2009 to 2010, and went on to represent Mercedes-Benz, Maybelline, Visa, TAG Heuer, and Omega, and — in the years since — Chopard, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and Tiffany, becoming one of the most consistently deployed Chinese faces in global luxury advertising.

December 2009 brought a stranger kind of headline: an Omega advertisement bearing her face, mounted near her home in Beijing, was splashed with black ink. 

A month later, a socialite told a tabloid the vandalism had stemmed from an affair between Zhang and a real-estate tycoon — a claim her then-fiancé, the Israeli-American investor Aviv "Vivi" Nevo, publicly denied on her behalf. 

Zhang sued the magazine for defamation and won; it folded within the year. The engagement to Nevo, which had begun in 2007 following an earlier relationship with Hong Kong businessman Eric Fok (2004–2006), ended in 2010. A relationship with the Chinese television host Sa Beining followed, from late 2011 to 2013.

In 2012, an overseas Chinese website falsely reported that Zhang had been paid $100 million to sleep with senior Chinese officials. She sued in a U.S. court and won, securing a settlement and a front-page apology in December 2013 — one of several defamation suits she pursued, and largely won, over the years.

That same year brought vindication of a different kind. In Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster (2013), playing the martial artist Gong Er, Zhang delivered what many critics still consider the finest performance of her career, winning twelve separate Best Actress awards across Asia — more than any Chinese actress had collected for a single role before. France made her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres that same year.

Zhang had been dating the rock musician Wang Feng since mid-2013. At her thirty-sixth birthday party in February 2015, he proposed by drone, flying the ring to her in front of the assembled guests; she said yes. They married in Hong Kong that May, over the objections of her brother, who distrusted Wang Feng's history — he had already been married twice, with two daughters from those earlier relationships. Their own daughter was born in the United States in December 2015; a son followed on New Year's Day, 2020.

In 2021 Zhang made her directorial debut with Poem, a short segment in the anthology film My Country, My Parents, winning a Best New Director award the following year.

On 23 October 2023, after eight years of marriage, Zhang and Wang announced their divorce in identical statements posted to Weibo. "我们之间没有是非对错之争，分离不代表辜负或背叛" ("There's no dispute of right or wrong between us; separation doesn't mean betrayal or letting each other down"), the statement read. Custody was reportedly split between them — their son staying with Zhang, their daughter with Wang.