Some celebrate good news with a big bash at a trendy nightspot; others treat themselves to an exotic holiday. But when the news broke that Sandrine Pinna was nominated for best actress at this year's Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan for her performance as an emotionally confused high school student in Miao Miao, her friends celebrated by baking her cookies.
'They told me they had been waiting for this day to arrive so they could tell people they've got a screen queen as a friend,' says Pinna, laughing. 'They really wanted me to do well. But they also joked and told me that I'm now a has-been on a comeback.'
Pinna, 21, is still completing university studies. It's easy, therefore, to consider her a neophyte among the four women nominated for best actress at the Golden Horse Awards: her competition includes 30-year-old Karena Lam Ka-yan, who has starred in 18 films since her award-winning debut in 2001's July Rhapsody, and 44-year-old Prudence Liew Mei-kwan, whose show business career - first as a child actor, then as a pop singer - began in the early 1980s. Even Monica Mok Siu-kei, who at 25 is closest to Pinna in age, seems to have a more diverse CV, with a business degree, a job at a bank and time spent on mainland television.
But Pinna's young age belies a body of work that goes back nearly a decade. Starting out in television commercials when she was just 10, the actor - born to a French father and a Taiwanese mother - made her screen debut in 2000 with a small role in Wu Mi-sen's Fluffy Rhapsody. Her stocks rose further in 2001 with her turn in the television series Poor Prince Taro, playing the younger sister of the titular character. Fast forward to 2006 and she started to deliver increasingly sturdier performances in no-frills dramas such as Isaac Li's Road in the Air and Cheng Yu-chieh's Do Over.
It was Pinna's work over the past year that finally propelled her into the big league. In Chen Hung-I's Candy Rain she plays an introvert struggling with a control freak she met on the internet, and in Chang Rong-ji's End of the Tunnel she delivers an intense performance as a heartbroken dance student heading to the seaside with a blind pianist classmate.
As Ai in Cheng Hsiao-tse's directorial debut, Miao Miao, her character's jovial exterior conceals her affection for her new best friend, exchange student Miao Miao (played by Ke Jiayan), and her pain at not being able to connect with her father. Pinna brings nuances and pathos to the role, helping to lift Miao Miao above a conventional teen romance.