Jiang Wen

Jiang Wen is a Chinese actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker born on January 5, 1963. He is widely recognized for directing and starring in acclaimed features such as In the Heat of the Sun, Devils on the Doorstep, The Sun Also Rises, and Let the Bullets Fly. As an actor, he gained prominent national and international recognition through television projects like A Native of Beijing in New York, as well as feature films including Hibiscus Town, Red Sorghum, and the Star Wars anthology film Rogue One. He is the elder brother of fellow actor Jiang Wu.

Born in Tangshan, Jiang was raised in a military family. His father, Jiang Hongqi, was a veteran of the Korean War who later made a brief appearance in one of Jiang's films, while his mother, Gao Yang, was a piano teacher. He has two younger siblings, Jiang Wu and Jiang Huan. At the age of ten, Jiang relocated to Beijing, where he attended Beijing No. 72 Middle School alongside classmate Ying Da. In 1980, he enrolled in the Central Academy of Drama, graduating in 1984 before being assigned as an actor to the China Youth Art Institute.

Jiang made his screen acting debut playing Puyi in The Last Empress. He achieved widespread prominence for his performance in Xie Jin's Hibiscus Town, which earned him the Best Actor award at the Hundred Flowers Awards. Following this success, he starred in Chun Tao and featured alongside Gong Li in Zhang Yimou's directorial debut, Red Sorghum. Throughout the 1990s, Jiang maintained a prolific acting career with roles in Black Snow, Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch, The Emperor's Shadow, The Soong Sisters, and Keep Cool, alongside his acclaimed television lead in A Native of Beijing in New York.

His acting career continued into the 2000s with roles in projects such as The Missing Gun, Green Tea, My Father and I, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, Jasmine Women, and Letter from an Unknown Woman. He portrayed historical figures including Mao Renfeng in The Founding of a Republic and Cao Cao in The Lost Bladesman. In 2016, Jiang played the character Baze Malbus in the Hollywood blockbuster Rogue One.

Jiang launched his directorial career in 1994 with In the Heat of the Sun, an adaptation of a Wang Shuo novel that won six Golden Horse Awards and secured the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for lead actor Xia Yu. In 2000, he directed and co-wrote the dark comedy Devils on the Doorstep, which took the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. However, Chinese authorities banned the film for distorting national history, leading to a seven-year ban on Jiang from directing films. During this hiatus, he served on the jury of the 23rd Moscow International Film Festival in 2001.

Jiang returned to directing in 2007 with The Sun Also Rises, followed by a contribution to the short film collection New York, I Love You. In 2010, his action-comedy Let the Bullets Fly achieved critical success and became the fastest Chinese-language production to surpass RMB 100 million at the domestic box office. He served on the 70th Venice International Film Festival jury in 2013. Jiang subsequently completed his gangster-focused Beiyang trilogy by directing Gone with the Bullets in 2014 and Hidden Man in 2018, the latter being chosen as China's official submission to the 91st Academy Awards.

Throughout his life, Jiang has maintained strong personal ties with his parents, regularly inviting them to film sets and consulting them on artistic choices. Between 1987 and 1994, he was in a relationship with his Hibiscus Town co-star Liu Xiaoqing. In 1997, he married French anthropology scholar Sandrine Chenivesse, with whom he has a daughter, prior to their divorce in 2005. Later that same year, Jiang married actress Zhou Yun, with whom he shares two sons.