Zhao Li-Ying 赵丽颖
Before landing her first major role, Zhao Li-Ying spent several years playing the daughters of protagonists, younger sisters and heroines in their youth in TV series. After The Journey of Flower and Princess Agents, she was known above all for costume dramas, while two of China's top television awards came to her for playing an entrepreneur who trades in scrap metal in Wild Bloom. In 2024 she was presented with the Hundred Flowers Award for Article 20. There Zhao played a mother who communicates in sign language and fights for justice for her husband.
Zhao Li-Ying was born on October 16, 1987, in Langfang, Hebei Province. She grew up in a rural family. Her grandparents worked the land, her father served in the police, and her mother worked as a saleswoman. After school, Zhao enrolled in a local vocational school that trained, among others, flight attendants. She never went into aviation and instead took a job as an assistant in the sales department of a company that protected pipelines from corrosion. In 2006, she saw an online announcement for an acting competition held by the Chinese division of Yahoo, a Zhejiang Province TV channel, and the Huayi Brothers studio. All you had to do to enter was send in a photograph. Zhao sent a picture taken by her uncle, made it through the selection, and won in Feng Xiao-Gang's group. He cast her in a Yahoo commercial.
Big roles did not follow right away. In Zheng Xiao-Long's Golden Wedding, Zhao played one of the main characters' daughters, and in The Dream of Red Mansions (2010) she landed the role of the young Xing Xueyan. Shooting The Firmament of the Pleiades (2010) stuck in her memory for a sharp remark from the director. He told her she was playing it wrong. Zhao went back to the hotel, went through the script once more, working out her character's actions, and the next day played it her own way. This time the director was pleased. In 2011, Zhao played Qing Er in New My Fair Princess, a remake of a series she had loved as a child. Then she was entrusted with a lead role in a big costume drama for the first time. In Female Prime Minister (2013) she played Lu Zhen, who enters service at the Northern Qi court and rises to a high position. Zhao recalled that many people wondered at the time why such a role had gone to a little-known actress. After this role, she herself already knew for certain that she wanted to be an actress. Her next success was the contemporary melodrama Boss & Me (2014). Zhao played the young employee Xue Shanshan, and her boss was played by Hans Zhang.
Preparing for The Journey of Flower (2015), Zhao read the novel the series was based on. As one of the screenwriters recalled, she came to the discussion alone, without an agent or assistant, and brought her own notes on the character. Hua Qiangu, a disciple of an immortal mentor played by Wallace Huo, changes so much over the course of the series that Zhao had to play both an innocent girl and a woman capable of turning against her own teacher. In 2016, the series earned Zhao a Golden Eagle Award in the audience category. By that time she was already filming the spy drama Rookie Agent Rouge (2016). And in Princess Agents (2017), Zhao played Chu Qiao, a slave who knows how to stand up for herself and becomes a warrior.
In feature films in those years she was given very different roles. In the comedy The Rise of a Tomboy (2016), Zhao played a girl trying to calculate love by formula. An HKCinema review noted that the actress's energy saves the film even where her character's actions are hard to explain. In Han Han's Duckweed (2017), she played the fiancée of a young father, whom a time traveler meets. In The Monkey King 3: Kingdom of Women (2018), her character, the ruler of the kingdom, falls in love with a monk played by William Feng Shao-Feng. As an HKCinema reviewer observed, it was this pair that got more attention in the film than the Monkey King himself.
On the set of The Monkey King 3: Kingdom of Women, Zhao grew close to William Feng. Soon they acted together again, this time in The Story Of Ming Lan (2018). Zhao played Sheng Minglan, the youngest daughter in a large family. From childhood she has to hide her abilities and keep a careful eye on what goes on in the household. In 2020 the actress received another Golden Eagle Award in the audience category for this role. Zhao and Feng announced their marriage in October 2018, and on March 8, 2019, Feng announced the birth of their son. In April 2021 their studios simultaneously announced their divorce. The statement said that because of work the couple had spent little time together and that they would raise the child jointly.
In August 2021, a rumor spread on social media that Zhao and Wang Yi-Bo, her co-star in The Legend of Fei (2020), would act together again, this time in Wild Bloom. Some of her fans demanded that she refuse to shoot with him, and the dispute with Wang Yi-Bo's fans quickly escalated into insults. The Weibo platform blocked a number of fan accounts and banned new posts on Zhao's official studio page for fifteen days. The actress herself urged her followers to communicate more calmly and wrote that a public figure is also responsible for the example they set. In the end, Wang Yi-Bo did not appear in Wild Bloom.
In 2022, two series with Zhao were released, and the fates of her new heroines had little in common with the earlier ones. In The Story of Xing Fu she worked again with Zheng Xiao-Long. The director said that in the actress, who grew up in a village, he saw the stubbornness needed for the role of He Xingfu. She demands an apology from those who humiliated her younger sister at her wedding and keeps seeking justice even when the neighbors advise her to give in. In Wild Bloom, Zhao played Xu Banxia, an entrepreneur who in the 1990s collects scrap metal and builds her own business in the steel industry. Zhao said that this work restored her self-confidence at a time when she had little idea where to go next. In 2024, the role of Xu Banxia brought her the Feitian Award and the Golden Eagle Award for Best Actress.
For Article 20 (2024), Zhao herself suggested to Zhang Yi-Mou that her character, Hao Xiuping, be deaf. She studied sign language, spent time with deaf people and tried to do without spoken speech on set. In an interview with Central Television, Zhao said she wore earplugs almost all the time to be less distracted by sounds. For the role of Hao Xiuping she received the Hundred Flowers Award as Best Supporting Actress. That same year Zhao came to the Tokyo International Film Festival, where The Unseen Sister was shown in competition. She played the famous actress Qiao Yan, who is visited after a long separation by her sister, played by Xin Zhilei. For this role Zhao, who grew up in the north, learned to speak with a Yunnan accent.
In 2025 she acted again for Feng Xiao-Gang, almost twenty years after the Yahoo commercial. In We Girls, her character Gao Yuexiang ends up in prison while trying to earn money for a cochlear implant for her daughter, and after her release she starts life anew together with a former cellmate. Once again Zhao had use for sign language. She used it both on camera and between takes. According to members of the crew, even some of those who did not need it for their roles mastered a few signs.
In January 2026, the series Big Matters of a Small Town (小城大事) was released. Zhao played Li Qiuping, an official who, together with the character of Huang Xiao-Ming, helps the residents build a new town on the site of coastal mudflats. At a meeting with viewers, Zhao said that her heroine seeks solutions relying on laws and rules, while her partner is used to relying on everyday experience. Hence, she said, the disputes between them.
