Yu Feihong (Chinese: 俞飞鸿; born 15 January 1971), also known as Faye Yu, is a Chinese actress and an occasional film director and producer, best known in the west for Wayne Wang's award-winning American films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007) and The Joy Luck Club (1992). In the Chinese-speaking world she is best known for starring in a number of popular Chinese television series.
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Biography
Yu was born into a senior intellectual family in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, on 15 January 1971. Her father graduated from Tsinghua University and her mother graduated from Zhejiang University of Technology. She has an older sister and a younger brother.
Yu was a child actress, having a lead role in the film The Murderer and the Craven when she was only 16. In 1991, while studying at the Beijing Film Academy, China's most prestigious film school, she became the first enrolled student in school history to be cast in a Hollywood production when Wayne Wang selected her for his film The Joy Luck Club. It took 3 months for her to receive an American visa, but Wang stuck with her. She returned to Beijing after filming, taught at the school for a while upon graduation, later studying in Los Angeles, before returning to China in 1998 to star in the television drama Hand-in-Hand which became a huge domestic hit. She followed up on its success with Yuen Woo-ping's 1999 wuxia TV drama Legend of Dagger Li, a Mainland-Taiwan co-production based on the popular Xiaoli Feidao novels.
Between 2005 and 2008 she only chose 1 acting project, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which briefly brought her back to the U.S. and reunited her with Wang. She spent most of her years then working on Eternal Beloved, her directorial debut that she also wrote (based on a novel), starred in, and produced. The film crashed in the Chinese box office, but won Yu the Best Directorial Debut Award at the Beijing College Student Film Festival.
