Michelle Reis may have turned 28 last week, but she's still as girlish as when she won the Miss Hong Kong pageant in 1988, at the tender age of 17. Stunningly beautiful - it helps when it comes to winning the Miss World International Goodwill Ambassador crown - she still seems like a teenager off-screen.
On-screen she can be a much darker force - from the femme fatale Agent in Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels to an ambitious prostitute in the upcoming Hou Hsiao-hsien film Flowers of Shanghai, Reis (or Lee Kar-yan, as she is known in Chinese) can project a dangerous beauty. It's not something she manages in person, however.
Born in Macau to a Portuguese father and Shanghainese mother, Reis was the only principal actor in Flowers of Shanghai (set in the city's 1880s-era brothels, or Flower Houses) who could fluently speak the dialect. Her co-star Tony Leung Chiu-wai spoke a mixture of Cantonese and Shanghainese while Japanese actress Michiko Hada was dubbed, but Reis sailed through, thanks to her mother.
'I have to say that my mother knew absolutely nothing of these places, the brothels!' she bubbles. 'But she did teach me the dialect. When I was young, I used to speak to her in Shanghainese but then I forgot a lot of the words so she gave me extra training. My father is Portuguese, but he was born in Hong Kong. We spoke Cantonese together. So I don't understand Portuguese.' Reis can add fluent English, Mandarin and beginner's Japanese to her roster of languages - thanks to a highly-lucrative career in Japanese advertising.
When she's not acting in films - last year she completed Armageddon opposite Andy Lau and Young and Dangerous IV with Ekin Cheng - she is on the plane to Tokyo where she can pick up a cool million or two for a day's work thanks to her popularity in Japan.
'It's a totally different thing,' she admits. 'I also do a lot of advertising work in Los Angeles, but I can't tell you there's a great deal of job satisfaction. But it's exciting enough, it's good money - I should say so.' Before Reis 'somehow picked up the nerve' to enter the 1988 Miss Hong Kong pageant, she had already appeared in more than 70 advertisements as a schoolgirl, from toothpaste to chewing gum. She's been smiling for the camera since she was 14.