Song aims to land some Stellar roles

Korean television queen Song Hye-kyo has joined action star Michelle Yeoh Choo-kheng's new talent agency Stellar in the hope of breaking into the Chinese-language film market.

Malaysian-born Yeoh - star of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005 - launched the agency in Hong Kong a fortnight ago with director John Woo Yu-sum's long-time business partner and producer Terence Chang Chia-chen and Taiwanese media personality David Tang Zaiyang. Song (below) joined the agency this week.

The agency has signed up star names such as veteran mainland actor Zhang Fengyi, actress Kelly Lin Hsi-lei and Wang Hui-ling, who scripted both Lust, Caution and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Song said that meeting the down-to-earth Yeoh at Cannes this year had made her determined to join the agency. 'Michelle is a renowned international actress but she doesn't show it at all. Instead, she took good care of me at Cannes and we spent a long time talking. She also shared some of her valuable working experience with me. I was very moved and I have a strong belief in her experience and professionalism [in the industry].'

Song, 26, a former figure skater, has starred in several Korean TV series in the past decade. She got her break playing a terminally-ill girl in the tragic romance series Autumn Fairy Tale in 2000. Her performance in the soap opera Full House (2004) opposite heart-throb Rain helped her win her first big screen role in My Girl and I (2005), followed by Hwang Jin-yi (2006) and this year's Fetish, directed by Sohn Soo-pum.

Chang said he not only found Song a very attractive actress, 'she also has a good grasp of acting ... I introduced her to John Woo and after meeting Song, he said he believed she would fit the lead role in his upcoming production 1949 perfectly.'