Joan Chen

Chen was already a star in China before most Western viewers had heard of her. Born in Shanghai, she made her film debut in Youth in 1977 and was a teenager when Little Flower followed in 1979, which is a level of early fame that usually ends badly. Instead she moved to the United States, where that stardom counted for very little.

The Last Emperor changed that in 1987. Playing Wan Jung in a Bertolucci epic that went on to take nine Academy Awards including Best Picture put her in front of a global audience, and the decade that followed shows Hollywood struggling to work out what to do with her: Josie Packard on Twin Peaks, which remains her best-known English-language role, then a genre stretch through Judge Dredd, On Deadly Ground, The Blood of Heroes, Wedlock and The Hunted. She has since collected four Taipei Golden Horse Awards and an AACTA Award, all for work Hollywood was not offering her.

So she started directing. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl in 1998 and Autumn in New York in 2000 make her one of very few actors of her generation to move behind the camera on both sides of the Pacific.

The current run is the best of her career and it is not close. Lust, Caution, Saving Face, Marco Polo, Tigertail, A Murder at the End of the World, Hachiko, then Chungsing Wang in Didi and May Chen in The Wedding Banquet. She plays women who have decided something long before the scene starts and are not going to explain it, and after four decades she is finally being written parts that assume exactly that.