Siqin Gaowa

Siqin Gaowa (Mongolian Cyrillic Цэцэнгуа, , born 19 January 1950), born Duan Anlin, is a Chinese-born Swiss actress. She was born in Guangzhou to a Han Chinese father and a Mongol Chinese mother. Her father died when she was 4, she was raised by her mother in Inner Mongolia. She has been married to musician Chen Liangsheng (陈亮声) since 1986 and currently holds Swiss citizenship together with her husband.

Siqin Gaowa made her debut in the 1981 film Anxious to Return, in which she plays Yuzhen, a woman that during the Sino-Japanese War saves a wounded soldier, and falls in love with him. She was awarded the Ministry of Culture's Youth Creativity Award for her performance. She achieved fame and garnered wide acclaim for her performance in the 1982 film Rickshaw Boy, an adaptation of Lao She's novel of the same title, in which she portrayed "Tigress", the love interest of Zhang Fengyi's character "Xiangzi". She won the Golden Rooster Award and Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress that year.

In 1995, she was a member of the jury at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.

Some of her most notable appearances in other movies include Kangxi Dynasty and Full Moon in New York. She won the award for Best Actress at the 4th Hong Kong Film Awards for Homecoming, becoming the first Mainland Chinese actress to win the honour. In 2008, she won her second Best Actress in the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards for her role in The Postmodern Life of My Aunt.

Early life Siqin Gaowa was born Duan Anlin in Guangzhou,

Her stage name, Siqin Gaowa, means "beauty and wisdom" in Mongolian. or Eagerly Homebound (Guixin sijian). For her portrayal in this movie, Siqin Gaowa won the Ministry of Culture's Youth Creativity Award in 1979.

The movie was also selected as Hong Kong's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 57th Academy Awards. For her performance in Homecoming she was awarded the 1985 Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress. At one point in the move the women carouse, and each one sings Chinese songs that are popular in her culture. The three immigrant women find themselves in New York without a physical home nor a homeland, they "each live and enact personal dramas of loss and displacement," but are finally depicted as happily together in the last scene.

In 1993, Siqin Gaowa played the lead role in Woman Sesame Oil Maker (1993), which tells the story of a woman in a small village in Hebei who runs a small sesame oil business that becomes unexpectedly successful, but who then uses her money to buy a peasant bride for her mentally disabled son. It was said that the woman, Xiang, "unforgettably played by Siqin Gaowa,"

The film won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival in 1993, and Siquin Gaowa was awarded the 1993 Silver Hugo Award for Best Actress at the Chicago International Film Festival.

In 2006, Siqin Gaowa starred alongside Chow Yun-fat in The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie was positively received, and received several awards and nominations. For he performance in this movie Gaowa won several awards, including the 27th Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress at the 43rd Golden Horse Awards.

Personal life In 1968, at the age of 18, Siqin Gaowa married Inner Mongolia Film Studio director Sun Tianxiang. The couple had a daughter Sun Dan (born 1969) and son Sun Tie (born 1973), who would later become an actor himself. She divorced Sun in 1976. In 1977, Siqin Gaowa remarried to Ao Xingchen, a Chinese actor of Daur descent, and they divorced in 1983.

In 1986, she married Swiss-Chinese orchestra conductor Chen Liangsheng, who was also known as Robert Chen and was previously married to Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. The couple emigrated to Switzerland. Chen died on 28 February 2022, at the age of 89.

Filmography

Anxious to Return (1981) Rickshaw Boy (1982) Homecoming (1984) Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain (1985) Full Moon in New York (1990) Woman Sesame Oil Maker (1993) Eunuch & Carpenter (1993) An Old Man and His Dog (1993) In the Heat of the Sun (1994) The Day the Sun Turned Cold (1994) Kangxi Dynasty (2001) Xiaozhuang Mishi (2003) Wu Zi Bei Ge (2006) The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006) Secret History of Empress Wu (2011) You Must Marry This Year (2011) Full Circle (2012) Happy Life of Yang Guang (2013) Switch (2013) Avalokitesvara (2013) Beijing Love Story (2014) One Day (2014) Lost in Wrestling (2015) An Accidental Shot of Love (2015) The Legend of Dragon Pearl (2017) The Lost Land (2018) Goodbye My Princess (2019)

Awards and nominations Siqin Gaowa has won nearly all the most prestigious awards in Asia, including China's two most prestigious awards in movie industry (Golden Rooster Awards and Hundred Flowers Awards) and the Hong Kong Film Award, Honk Kong's equivalent of the Academy Awards. She was nominated for Best Actress twice at the Golden Horse Awards.