Joan Chen Net Worth, Height, Age, & Personal Info Wiki

At the age of 20, Chen immigrated to the United States and enrolled at California State University, Northridge, where she studied film. Her first Hollywood film, Tai-Pan, was shot on Chinese soil. 

She appeared in the Chinese film Little Flower in 1979, and her work in the 1987 drama The Last Emperor caught the attention of American viewers.

Joan is also well-known for directing the feature film Xiu Xiu: The Sent down Girl and for her performances in Saving Face, Twin Peaks, Red Rose White Rose, and The Home Song Stories.

In 1979, Chen appeared in Zhang Zheng’s Little Flower alongside Tang Guoqiang, for which she received the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress.

Chen played a daughter of a pre-Maoist revolutionary who later discovered that her biological mother was his doctor after being reunited with her brother, a wounded Communist soldier.

Her second film, Little Flower, helped her quickly become one of China’s most adored actresses; Time magazine dubbed her “the Elizabeth Taylor of China” for her success at such a young age.

Chen also appeared in the 1979 movie Hearts for the Motherland.

A Chinese family living abroad returns to China from Southeast Asia out of patriotism in the movie directed by Ou Fan and Xing Jitian.

Still, they run into political problems during the Cultural Revolution.

The songs Chen’s character sings, “I Love You, China” and “High Flies the Petrel,” are enduring favorites in China. Chen starred in Teng Wenji’s 1981 film Awakening.

She appeared in the 1985 “Golden Triangle” episode of the American television series Miami Vice as May Ying, Martin Castillo’s ex-wife and Ma Sek’s husband. Later, she played Josie Packard in the David Lynch/Mark Frost television series Twin Peaks and the 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor. In 1989’s The Blood of Heroes, written and directed by David Webb Peoples, she co-starred with Rutger Hauer. She appeared with Oliver Stone in Heaven & Earth in 1993. She played two distinct roles in Clara Law’s Temptation of a Monk: a seductive Tang dynasty princess and a dangerous temptress. For the part, she shaved her head on-screen. The acclaimed movie was made based on a Lilian Lee book.

Chen returned to acting in the middle of the 2000s and started to work hard, switching between English- and Chinese-language roles. She and Zhang Ziyi co-starred in Hou Yong’s family drama Jasmine Women in 2004, playing various positions, including mothers and daughters across three generations in Shanghai. Joan also starred in the Asian-American comedy Saving Face as a widowed mother. She had moved in with her lesbian daughter after being shunned by the Chinese-American community for being pregnant and unmarried. Joan portrayed a mother whose son and husband had a troubled father-son relationship for over 30 years in Zhang Yang’s family drama Sunflower in 2005. She appeared in Michael Almereyda’s Tonight at Noon, the first of a two-part project set to be released in 2009, and the Asian American independent film Americanese.

The inaugural Singapore Sun Film Festival, whose theme was “The Art of Living Well,” was organized by Joan Chen in October 2009. The five films she chose and curated for the festival were the Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Dead Man Walking, Hannah, Her Sisters, Still Life, and Edward Scissorhands. 2010 saw Chen join the casts of veteran acting coach Larry Moss’ Relative Insanity, Alexi Tan’s Color Me Love, Ilkka Järvi-Kiss, Laturi’s His First, and Leehom Wang’s Love in Disguise, the director’s debut. She was slated to star in and helm one of the three segments of the anthology movie seeing Red in May 2010.

She portrayed Secretary Bishop’s girlfriend in the episode of Fringe titled “Immortality” in 2011. Chen was chosen to play Chabi, the empress of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, in the 2014 American television series Marco Polo. Chen, who had little prior knowledge of the Mongols, read The Secret History of the Mongol Queens to prepare for the part. Additionally, she played Ula Nara Yixiu in several episodes of the 2018 Chinese television drama Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace. (4)