Biography
Fan Bingbing was a bona fide superstar in her native China years before she gained any Western recognition. Born in September 1981 in Qingdao, but raised in Yantai, Fan began acting in her teens and first gained popularity in a supporting role on the Chinese television series "Princess Pearl" (HBS, 1998-99). In 2006, with over two dozen film and TV roles already on her resume, Fan released her first pop album, Just Begun. In 2007 Fan started her own film and TV studio and began producing many of the shows and movies in which she starred. The Beijing Times ranked her number one on their 2010 "50 Most Beautiful People In China" list. Expanding her international profile, she starred in "Chongqing Blues" (2010) which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and won Best Actress at the Tokyo International Film Festival for her role in "Buddha Mountain" (2010). Although Fan garnered much international praise for her Chinese-language films, it wasn't until she took the high-profile part of mutant Blink, who has the power of creating teleportation wormholes, part in the ensemble of "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014) that she gained any significant mainstream exposure in the west.
