Liao Fan 廖凡
Before Berlin, Chinese audiences knew Liao Fan from TV series and roles like Third Brother, one of the bandits in Let the Bullets Fly. At forty he became the first Chinese actor to win the Silver Bear for Best Actor. In Black Coal, Thin Ice he played a former policeman who takes on an old case when his own life has already gone off the rails. Just a year later Liao was wielding paired knives in The Master, and then in Ash is Purest White he played a provincial gang boss for whom it grows harder every year to act as if there is still anyone left to boss around.
Liao Fan was born on February 14, 1974, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. His father, Liao Bingyan, performed with a Hunan drama troupe until he was nearly seventy; his mother was also an actress and later became a costume designer. Liao himself said he grew up in the orchestra pit. While his parents worked, he and the other children played hide-and-seek backstage and climbed up under the ceiling to watch the lighting crew aim the spotlights at the stage. At the age of six he found himself on a film set for the first time. As his father told the newspaper Hunan Ribao, the director needed a boy for a scene in a melon patch. Liao came home with a big watermelon — his first fee, as his father joked.
He only began thinking about acting as a profession in his final year of school. In 1993 Liao enrolled at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Tuition had to be paid, and by his account the family found it hard going. While preparing a student étude, he spent long hours trailing an old knife-grinder through the streets, studying his movements. The étude won first prize at a competition of theatre schools. The academy dates the award to 1995, while Liao's father said 1996. Still a student, in 1995, Liao played a taxi driver in the TV series Late Autumn in Beijing (北京深秋的故事). After graduating in 1997, he joined the Central Experimental Theatre in Beijing, which later became part of the National Theatre of China. On television he came to notice in the series Cherish Our Love Forever (1998), playing the quiet Yu Sen, in love with a classmate. Liao recalled that the role came easily to him. Like his character, he had been a good student, and he too had been offered a teaching post.
At the theatre Liao worked with Meng Jing-Hui. In the first production of his Rhinoceros in Love (1999) Liao had a small part, and in Meng's feature directing debut Chicken Poets (2002) he played a former poet who now raises black chickens and dreams of supplying the whole country with their eggs. His first film award came from another directing debut — Liu Fen-Dou's Green Hat (the film screened at festivals in 2004, though the Rotterdam Film Festival catalogue lists 2003). Liao had been considered for another role, but he wanted to play a bank robber whose girlfriend leaves him. When the actor cast in the part dropped out, the role went to him. At the Singapore International Film Festival in 2005, Liao and his co-star Li Congxi shared the Best Actor prize.
Liao worked with Liu Fen-Dou again on Ocean Flame (2008), playing Wang Yao, a blackmailer and pimp who takes up with a young waitress. The actor recalled that he spent three months getting in shape, running six kilometres a day in the heat and getting so tanned that he barely recognised himself. Liu, meanwhile, told the magazine Minsheng Zhoukan how, during the shoot in a fishing village, the two of them pulled the drowning first assistant director out of the sea. Before that, by Liu's admission, they had worked well together even though their temperaments clashed. Liu remembered that Liao jumped into the water after him, shoes and all. Towards the end of the shoot, the director took the actor aside and told him that from that day on he considered him a friend. The film screened in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section, and Liao received his first Golden Horse nomination. Neither of Liu's films was released theatrically in mainland China at the time.
Audiences in China knew Liao better from other work. In Feng Xiao-Gang's war drama Assembly (2007) he played platoon commander Jiao Dapeng, and in the series The Line (2009) he was the underground operative Ouyang Shanchuan. According to Liao, the crew argued for a long time over which of the two characters he should play, and it even came to a vote. That same year, while shooting Beginning of the Great Revival, in which he played the young Zhu De, Liao fell from a horse and badly injured his shoulder. The operation, by his account, lasted eight hours. For another two years he avoided sudden movements, though he kept on acting. In Jackie Chan's action film CZ12 (2012) he took the role of David, a technical specialist on a team of treasure hunters.
Liao told the Southern Weekly that after the injury he lost interest in filming for a while. It was then that he read the script for Black Coal, Thin Ice by Diao Yi-Nan and immediately agreed to play Zhang Zili. In the fallen detective he sensed something familiar. In Harbin he spent about two weeks with the criminal investigation department, listening to police officers and watching footage of arrests. For the scenes in which his character has already left the police force and drinks, Liao, by his own account, gained about ten kilograms. For the scene in which Zhang dances alone, Liao made a special trip back to Harbin and asked an acquaintance who was a dancer to help with the choreography. The man listened to the character's whole story and advised Liao to dance however he liked. On 15 February 2014, Berlin time (in Beijing it was already 16 February), the day after Liao's fortieth birthday, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai presented him with the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. The film won the Golden Bear, and a year later the same role brought Liao the Asian Film Awards prize for Best Actor.
For Xu Hao-Feng's The Master (2015), Liao asked for a year to prepare. Xu gave him two months. Liao played Chen Shi, a Wing Chun master from the south who comes to Tianjin to open a school and is forced to reckon with local customs. The long fight in the alley, according to Liao, was shot over fifteen days, while Xu said eleven. The actor recalled that he fought himself, without a double, and with that many weapons there were plenty of bruises. In its review, HKCinema particularly noted how naturally he handles knives. That same year saw the release of the romantic comedy Only You, an official remake of the 1994 Hollywood picture. In it Liao played an antiques dealer who meets a Chinese woman in Italy and passes himself off as the man she is looking for.
Jiang Wen cast Liao again in Hidden Man (2018), where he played Zhu Qianlong, who betrayed his own master. That same year Cannes screened Jia Zhang-Ke's Ash is Purest White. At the start of the film his Bin holds the local underworld in his hands. Many years later, after a stroke, he can barely control his own body. Liao especially liked the scenes in which he and Zhao Tao played almost without words. He also recalled the episode on the dance floor, when he turned to another woman on the move and Zhao immediately pulled him back. They had not agreed on this beforehand. A year later the Cannes competition screened Wild Goose Lake (2019), in which Liao again appeared for Diao Yi-Nan. This time he played the head of the criminal investigation department, who leads the manhunt for a fugitive car thief.
On television Liao had plenty of work after Berlin as well. In The Long Night (2020), his investigator Yan Liang unravels a case that a young prosecutor had taken on several years earlier. For the role of Lao Sun, who accompanies a young revolutionary in the series Joyful Face (欢颜, 2023), Liao was nominated in 2024 for Shanghai's Magnolia Award as Best Supporting Actor. And in Dead End (2025) he played Ran Xi, a local police officer who, together with a young partner, spends years hunting a killer in a neighborhood where he knows almost every resident.
Liao Fan rarely talks about his personal life. In April 2008, Sohu published photographs of the actor with the screenwriter Huo Xin, one of the writers of the series Cherish Our Love Forever, and reported a possible romance. Liao responded that they were old friends and flatly denied the rumor. In November 2009, when he was again asked about Huo Xin, he said they were close but each lived their own life. After Berlin, Hunan Daily, having spoken with Liao's father, was already calling Huo Xin his girlfriend. The newspaper reported that on the morning after the award ceremony his parents received two photographs with the Silver Bear. In one, Liao himself was holding the prize; in the other, Huo Xin. Later there was talk of marriage as well. In 2019 the Phoenix portal retold an unconfirmed rumor that they had registered their marriage back in 2012.
