Joan of Art

Once the transpacific princess of good films and bad, Joan Chen is now an award-winning auteur

It might sound like the ultimate East-goes-West success story. Chen Chong, the daughter of two Shanghai doctors, becomes a movie star at 15, is dubbed "the young Elizabeth Taylor of China" and, at 19, wins the country's top acting prize. She goes to America where, as Joan Chen, she stars in The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks and Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth. Chen shuttles between East and West, playing fiercely intelligent seducers in the Hong Kong Temptation of a Monk and Red Rose, White Rose while making onscreen love with Anne Heche in Hollywood's Wild Side. She marries happily to Peter...

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