Michelle Ye Xuan should be a familiar face to local soap-opera aficionados: the Hangzhou-born actress and 1999 Miss Chinese International has performed in more than 20 TV series since she returned from the US where she moved when she was 11. Ye left television four years ago and has since immersed herself in the film industry, with roles in 14 movies.
This year has been particularly fruitful: Ye played a mobster's wife in Lady Cop and Papa Crook, while in Johnnie To Kei-fung's Vengeance - which opened last week - she portrays a jaded homemaker who teams up with an assassin-turned-restaurateur (Johnny Hallyday) for a hit on a menacing gangster.
Next month she will promote Vengeance in Venice, where Soi Cheang Pou-soi's Accident will be a competition entry at the Italian city's film festival.
Does your past as a beauty queen limit your choices as an actor? Not at all. I will do whatever the director says. I hardly put any makeup on during the filming of Vengeance and I had my hair cut really short for a new film, Fire Dragon. I have never had my hair cut that short, but I am clear about what I'm really passionate about: not my hair, but acting. If a role required me to be bald, I would shave my head without question.
What was it like going from playing lead characters on television to supporting roles in films? Making movies is what every actor dreams of, and without the training at TVB, I wouldn't have had a chance to break onto the big screen.
I was lucky to have played my first screen role opposite Leon Lai Ming in Moonlight in Tokyo in 2005, but when I was approached for Dante Lam Chiu-yin's Undercover Hidden Dragon the following year, my agency didn't want me to accept the job because it was only a small role.
I insisted on taking that job. An accomplished Cantonese opera singer, for example, might want to branch out into Peking opera, but he or she will not receive the lead roles immediately. When Dante made Sniper, he remembered me and now I am in his latest movie, Fire Dragon.