Actor Ying Ruocheng, best known for his role as a communist interrogator in Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's epic The Last Emperor, died early yesterday in Beijing. He was 74.
The Beijing Evening Post said the famous actor and translator died from a respiratory and circulation system failure induced by cirrhosis of the liver. He had been critically ill for much of the past three years with the disease.
In the late 1980s, Ying won worldwide acclaim for translating and bringing to Chinese audiences Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Energetic and dynamic, Ying, vice-minister of culture from 1986 to 1991, pursued his lifelong passion for the theatre to the last.
He was still translating a British television production of Hamlet, as well as Coriolanus, into Chinese last year. Only this year did he stand down as a National People's Congress delegate.
Ying was a language graduate of Tsinghua University in Beijing and spoke excellent English. Apart from translating western plays, he also translated a number of classic Chinese plays into English.