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The most international Chinese actress, possessing a beauty and dazzling sweetness, Gong Li was a muse of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, those born after the Cultural Revolution, and especially Zhang Yimou, who was also his partner for some years.

Gong Li was born on December 31, 1965 in Shenyang (China), growing up in Jinam, the capital of Shandong Province. She is the daughter of an economist and teacher and a teacher and the youngest of five brothers. From a young age he wanted to dedicate himself to the world of entertainment, and in school he excelled in singing and dancing, to the point of excluding other subjects. The small Li always wanted to be a musical performer but they closed the doors of the Singing School.

She was finally accepted to the Central School of Dramatic Arts in Beijing in 1985, where she graduated in 1989. She was still a student at the school when director Zhang Yimou chose her in 1987 for the leading role in her first film as a director, 'Red Sorghum' ', with which he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Since then, Gong Li is one of the most successful actresses in the history of China, with a reputation that has transcended the borders of the Asian country. Gong Li and Yimou started together a profitable sentimental and professional relationship that would lead them to shoot seven more titles: 'The red lantern', 'Qui Ju, a Chinese woman', 'Do Jou', 'Live!', 'Quin yong ', and' The jewel of Shangai ', the latter when they had already separated as a couple. Throughout their collaboration, a scandal was generated because they were lovers, even though Zhang was married. They broke up in 1995, and Gong Li married a Singaporean tobacco magnate named Ooi Hoe Soeng the following year.

The emergence of Gong Li in the West, especially at festivals, caused a huge impact on the public. His sensitivity and sweetness captivated everyone. Anecdotally, it should be noted that in his first appearance at Cannes, a Spanish producer specializing in 'uncover cinema', he wanted to hire at all costs for one of his films. Fortunately, Li did not respond to that offer.

In the massive press conference of 'The Jewel of Shanghai' at the Cannes Film Festival, with Yimou sitting next to Gong Li (they had already been separated for a year), when the actress was asked about her work with the director once They have broken the relationship, Gong Li could not help spilling a tear that ran down his cheek. That tear before hundreds of photographers and television cameras, went around the world. In 2007, eleven years after his previous film, Gong Li and Zhang Yimou make their last collaboration with 'The Curse of the Golden Flower'.

Gong Li was the actress who made the first nude in the cinema of communist China. It is the anecdote of an unstoppable career full of protagonists, such as the ones worked with Chen Kaige in 'Adiós a mi concubina', 'Luna tempdora' and 'El emperador y el asesino', and the almost stellar participation in '2046', Wong Kar-wai

In 1997 Gong Li made the leap to international cinema with 'La caja china', along with Jeremy Irons, under the direction of Wang Wayne. Since then he combines his work in his country with Western productions, in Japan, the United States and Europe, as 'Memoirs of a Geisha' in 2005, a Steven Spielberg production, which had Rob Marshall as director, and which raised a strong controversy in Japan because they did not accept that a Chinese actress gave life to a character so characteristic of Japanese culture as a geisha. At the beginning of the decade of the 90s he also collaborated with the director Stephen Chow in the comedies 'God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai' (1991) and 'Flirting Scholar (1993)'.