Lucy Liu

Info

Full Name: Lucy Liu
Date of birth: December 2, 1968 (57 years old)
Location: Queens (Nueva York)
Country: USA

Lucy Liu has been active for 32 years, participating in 38 movies that average a 6.9/10 score.

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Biography

In December 2025, after almost thirty years of work, Lucy Liu opened a film as a dramatic lead for the first time. It is called 'Rosemead', she produced it herself, and it has brought her the best reviews of her career plus a career award at the Locarno festival. That this happened at 57 says a good deal about the parts Hollywood has been offering Asian American actresses for decades.

She was born on 2 December 1968 in Jackson Heights, one of the most mixed neighbourhoods in New York. Her mother Cecilia was a biochemist and her father Tom a civil engineer; both had left China, spent time in Taiwan and met once they were in New York. Mandarin was the language at home and she did not learn English until she was five.

She went to Stuyvesant, one of the toughest state schools in the city, started university at NYU and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1990 with a degree in Asian languages and cultures. It was there that something she still tells happened: she auditioned for a small part in 'Alice in Wonderland' and walked out with the lead.

Ling Woo and the noise around Ally McBeal

A talent scout had stopped her on the New York subway when she was nineteen, which led to a commercial. The early jobs were scraps, including a single shot as an ex girlfriend in 'Jerry Maguire' (1996) and guest spots on network shows that came and went without much trace.

Everything changed in 1998. She auditioned for the part of Nelle Porter in 'Ally McBeal', did not get it, and David E. Kelley decided to write her a new one: Ling Woo, a lawyer with a sharp tongue, no filter and a magnificent contempt for almost everyone.

She arrived as a temporary addition and stayed four seasons opposite Calista Flockhart. The role brought her Emmy and Screen Actors Guild nominations in 1999 and made her a familiar face on both sides of the Atlantic, with Channel 4 running the show in Britain. It also brought the argument that has followed her ever since, because Ling was at once a memorable character and a row of clichés about Asian women.

Angels, a runaway princess and O-Ren Ishii

Film work arrived in a rush. She played a triad dominatrix in 'Payback' (1999) and a runaway princess in 'Shanghai Noon' (2000) with Jackie Chan, and then took on Alex Munday in 'Charlie's Angels' (2000) with Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore.

The film took more than 260 million dollars worldwide and got a sequel in 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle' (2003). In between she joined the ensemble of 'Chicago' (2002), which went on to win the Oscar for best picture.

Her most quoted part, though, is O-Ren Ishii in 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1' (2003). Quentin Tarantino made her the head of the Tokyo underworld who faces Uma Thurman in a snowed over garden, and handed her the film's most remembered introduction along the way, when she takes a crime boss's head off across the conference table. She returned in 'Kill Bill: Vol. 2' (2004) and won the MTV award for best villain.

The years that followed were split between thrillers and genre pictures: 'Lucky Number Slevin' (2006), 'Domino' (2005), 'Detachment' (2011) and 'The Man with the Iron Fists' (2012).

She built a large voice career in parallel, which is where plenty of children know her without realising it: she is Viper in the 'Kung Fu Panda' trilogy, the water fairy Silvermist across the 'Tinker Bell' films, one of the sisters in 'Mulan II' (2004) and commander Callisto Mal in 'Strange World' (2022).

Joan Watson and the director's chair

Before that she did two seasons of 'Dirty Sexy Money' (2008) and, in 2012, a short but very well received run on 'Southland', where Officer Jessica Tang won her the American critics' award for best guest performer in a drama.

In 2012 she also took on something that looked risky on paper: playing Sherlock Holmes's Doctor Watson as a woman. 'Elementary' ran for seven seasons on CBS, until 2019, with Liu as Joan Watson, a former surgeon working as a sober companion, opposite the Holmes of the British actor Jonny Lee Miller. That came to 154 episodes, and the pair were kept as friends throughout, with no romance, a line the show held to the end.

Another side of her career started there. Liu moved behind the camera and directed seven episodes of the series, then one of 'Why Women Kill' (2019), in which she also played Simone Grove, the gallery owner of the strand set in the eighties.

Her directing went beyond her own shows. In 2018 she shot the episode that opens the second season of 'Luke Cage', Marvel's series for Netflix. That show's producer had met her on the 'Southland' set.

The rest of the decade took her through wildly different jobs: the villain Kalypso in 'Shazam! Fury of the Gods' (2023), head of North Pole security in 'Red One' (2024) and a mother in 'Presence' (2024), the haunted house film Steven Soderbergh shot entirely from the ghost's point of view.

This year she joined the new intake of 'The Devil Wears Prada 2', out in cinemas in May 2026, which brings back Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, with Kenneth Branagh among the new faces.

Rosemead, the part that took thirty years

'Rosemead' is the first feature by Eric Lin, until now a cinematographer, and it comes from a 2017 column in the 'Los Angeles Times' by the journalist Frank Shyong. It tells the true story of Irene, a Taiwanese American mother with terminal cancer who lives alone with her teenage son in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, as the boy's schizophrenia worsens.

Liu plays Irene and produced the film, shot on a tiny budget, with Lawrence Shou as her son. It is not a flattering part: the film deals with love, fear and a decision that is hard to swallow, and she carries it without leaning on anything that made her famous. No wigs, no fight choreography, no punchlines.

The festival run has backed her up. It premiered at Tribeca, won best narrative feature at Bentonville and the audience award at Locarno, where she also collected the career achievement award, and added the Trailblazer prize handed out at the American critics' celebration of Asian American cinema. British audiences have caught it on the festival circuit, Leeds included, with international sales handled out of Berlin.

Paintings, UNICEF and a star on the Walk of Fame

What almost nobody knew for years is that Liu has a second career as a visual artist. She has painted since she was fifteen, long before acting came up, and started exhibiting in 1993 with a photography show at the Cast Iron Gallery in New York that won her a grant to study at Beijing Normal University. For a long time she signed her work Yu Ling, her Chinese name, so that nobody would turn up because of the actress.

She studied at the New York Studio School between 2004 and 2006 and has since taken her paintings and installations to London, where she showed 'Seventy Two' in 2011, as well as Beijing and the National Museum of Singapore, which gave her a major show in 2019. She had another exhibition in a Manhattan gallery earlier this year, which ran until June.

She has been an ambassador for the US fund for UNICEF since 2004, with field trips to Pakistan and Lesotho among others, and she has channelled money from the sale of her work back to the organisation. Her art and her campaigning have run alongside the acting for most of her adult life. In 2019 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the second Chinese American woman to get one, almost sixty years after Anna May Wong.

She says little about her private life. She is a single mother to Rockwell, born in 2015 through a surrogate, a decision she explained plainly: she was working non stop and had no idea when she would be able to stop. She still lives in New York, still paints and, going by the past year, has finally found the kind of part she had been asking for since the nineties.