Carina Lau

Trivia

• Voted by people's choice as the Best Actress of the year for her performance in Curiosity Kills the Cat and the award was hosted by Sina.Com.
• She accepted the award with much gratitude to the audiences and the director and fellow actor who recommended her to take the role.
• Worked on Wong Kar Wai's 2046 for 5 years and had no idea what the film was about, she also admitted that WKW had been one of the best directors in her career and during the making of Days of Being Wild, he bought out the best actress in her.
• The first actress to become CEO of Hong Kong's first shopping channel TV Mart.
• She insisted on buying and getting her own wardrobe custom designed by long time friend costume/production designer William Cheung Suk Pink for her first Mandarin China produced TV series called The River Flows Eastward. It was reported that she had gathered over one hundred outfits for the show. She also hired him to do design interior for her home.
• She was kidnapped and tortured by gangsters in the early 1990s before filming Days of Being Wild. Pictures of her semi-naked in a state of distress from that incident was published on the cover of a Hong Kong magazine more than 10 years later which shocked the entire Hong Kong movie industry.
• She bravely came out to give her speech to confront the cruel treatment on a much publicized conference, and received much support from her peers and public. That magazine publication was immediately shut down.
• She was one of the handful actresses to be earning $1M salary per picture in Hong Kong back in the early 1990's when she used to work on at least 6 movies a year, and in recent years she works on merely one movie a year.
• Took dancing lessons and had dental work as her preparation for her participation in Wong Kar Wai's Days Of Being Wild. She was named one of the ten sexiest foreign actors by a Japanese magazine for this film.
• Released 3 Mandarin albums between 1994-1996 in Taiwan. She has played a singer in films numerous times.

Quotes

• "On losing her much anticipated Golden Horse Best Actress Award (11-2006): There are two different groups of people in the world. There is the ones that are very lucky and happened to be at the right place at the right time, and there is the ones that have to work extremely hard but a lack of luck often prevents them to win. I belong to the latter...I have no doubt about my own performance just because I have not won."
• "I wasn't born to be a normal person. My life's path is very different from normal people. I am made of three different roles: Woman, Movie Star, and Actress. It's upto you to choose which Carina Lau you like."
• "At my age, I don't need to win any awards to prove that I am good or worthy of the jobs that I get offered, and winning awards now wouldn't increase my bankability or validation. Back in the early years of my career, I was always desperate for awards, because I believed they could easily escalate my career and demand in the film industry."