Ruby Lin Xin-Ru 林心如

Ruby Lin shot to fame in her early twenties as the well-bred, gentle Ziwei in My Fair Princess. It was an image she spent years trying to shed. Lin founded her own studio and took on the stories she herself wanted to see on screen. In the series The Way We Were, she played one of five friends from Taipei whose story spans sixteen years. For Light the Night, Lin and her team recreated the nightlife district of late-1980s Taipei. She herself played the hostess of a Japanese bar there, a woman who can stand up for herself and sometimes comes to the aid of people she has long been angry with.

Ruby Lin was born on January 27, 1976, in Taiwan and grew up in Wugu, just outside Taipei. Her father worked in investments, her mother kept house. Ruby has two younger brothers. Her parents separated when she was in the first grade. Her father visited often, while her mother kept an eye on her studies and insisted that her daughter come home on time. Years later, her parents got back together. In high school, Lin began appearing in commercials. Her family was not especially thrilled at first, and Ruby herself decided that the studies abroad she had been considering could wait. She could already be seen on screen in the Taiwanese comedy School Days (1995) with Jimmy Lin and Kaneshiro Takeshi. Her first TV roles soon followed.

In the mid-1990s, Lin began working with Chong Yao, one of the most popular writers of Taiwanese melodramas. For My Fair Princess (1998), she was initially offered the part of a Tibetan princess. When the roles were reassigned, she was given Ziwei, the daughter of Emperor Qianlong, who at court is at first taken for a maid. After the first auditions she was nearly replaced. Lin recalled begging Chong Yao in tears to let her keep the role. Her Ziwei set off nicely against the mischievous heroine played by Vicki Zhao. The series was a hit both in Taiwan and on the mainland, and a year later came My Fair Princess 2 with the same actresses. Audiences grew used to thinking of Lin as demure and quiet like Ziwei, and were surprised when they met her in person. Lin herself recalled that at school she was a ringleader who thought nothing of teasing the boys.

Over the next few years she worked on both sides of the strait and in Hong Kong. In Stanley Tong's action film China Strike Force (2000), Lin appeared alongside Aaron Kwok Fu-Sing, and in The Duke of Mount Deer (2000) she played the spoiled Princess Jianning. Chong Yao once again assembled the cast of My Fair Princess for Romance in the Rain (2001), this time about the lives of two sisters in Shanghai on the eve of the war with Japan. Lin played the younger one, Lu Ruping, in love with the same man as her sister. In Eighteen Springs, based on the novel by Eileen Chang Ai-Ling, she played Gu Manzhen, who is separated from her beloved for years. Ruby appeared in many melodramas, but over time she increasingly wanted to decide for herself which stories to tell. By her account, producers did not always see her in complex and interesting roles, and a suitable offer could take years to come.

In 2009, Lin founded her own studio. While she was learning the producer's trade, Schemes of a Beauty (2010) was released in China, with Ruby playing Dou Yifang, the future empress of the Han era. A year later the studio released its first major production, Princess Dumping World (2011). Lin played Princess Ma Fuyan, whose family perishes in the struggle for power. The same series starred Wallace Huo Jian-Hua, a longtime friend of Ruby's.

The first major Taiwanese series that Lin produced and starred in was The Way We Were (2014). In the early episodes Lin once again had to play a student, this time named Tang Jiani. The story begins in 1998 and spans sixteen years in the lives of five friends. Their relationships change, and so does the city they grew up in. In 2015 the series won three Golden Bell Awards, including Best Television Drama. In 2016 Ruby married Wallace Huo, and early the following year they had a daughter. In Taiwan, Lin continued to work with local screenwriters and directors. In My Dear Boy (2017), which she also produced, her character, a commercial director named Luo Xiaofei, falls in love with a man much younger than herself. Lin still took on roles in other people's films as well. That same year she played Chen Jing, the ex-wife of a murdered man, in The Devotion of Suspect X. This adaptation of a Japanese detective novel was directed by her early co-star Alec Su.

Work on the series Light the Night (2021–2022) took several years. Together with screenwriter Du Zheng-Zhe, with whom she had already worked on The Way We Were, Lin moved the setting to 1988, to a Taipei district where the Japanese loved to go bar-hopping. Before shooting, the actresses visited one of those bars and learned how to receive guests. Lin said that at first even small things surprised her, like whose glass you are supposed to hold higher when toasting and where a bar employee is allowed to sit. More than a thousand costumes were assembled for the series, from tailored jackets to evening gowns. Lin herself played Luo Yunong, nicknamed Rose, one of two friends who run the bar "Light." The other owner, Su Qingyi, was played by Cheryl Yang. The story includes a murder investigation, but above all Lin wanted to show the lives of women who greet customers at the counter every night. The series was released by Netflix, and audiences far beyond Taiwan saw late-1980s Taipei. In parallel, Lin studied media management at Shih Hsin University. At first she traveled to Shanghai for classes, and after the pandemic began she continued her studies in Taipei. When the university held a press event to mark the start of shooting on the series, Lin went straight from it to class. She completed the program in 2021.

Lin produced the family drama Living (2023). At its center are three brothers and their parents, who have lived for years with old grievances and gradually learn to talk about them. From the start Lin knew whom she wanted for the parents' roles and insisted that the invited actors look like a real family on screen. In 2024 the series took six Golden Bell Awards, including Best Drama. Lin walked on stage to accept the award on behalf of the whole team. And in the fall of 2026, TVBS announced the premiere date of her next producing project, Story Starts from Bed. This story about how people of different ages understand intimacy included intimate scenes, and the director and actors rehearsed them in advance with an intimacy coordinator. Lin attended the rehearsals and said it was the first time she had seen a crew agree with the actors on literally every movement before anyone even stepped onto the set.