(Ecns.cn)--Back in the 1980s, Liu Xiaoqing was an out-and-out dominator of China's silver screen, winning five Hundred Flower Awards (China's top public choice movie award) and a Golden Rooster Award (the nation's version of the Academy Awards).
Ever since, the movie star and once successful businesswoman has never stopped making headlines.
Born in 1955, Liu has often been criticized for playing much younger ladies since entering the autumn of her life, while her peers are either retiring or taking on grandmother roles.
Looking like a 20-something, Liu explained to reporters from China Newsweek that "people around me all seemed to be vexed. But youth is a matter of the mind."
Liu is also a great fan of badminton, and can play against a professional athlete for three straight hours. In the open-air song-and-dance show On the E Pang Palace (E Pang Gong Fu) in 2010, Liu played the lead role for nearly 90 days without much rest.
Becoming a movie star
Liu became a drama actress at the Chengdu Military Drama Group after graduating from middle school in 1970, and officially started her career in 1975, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
By the end of the 70s China entered a new era, when people on the art scene began to break out from fixed images to express their real selves. Liu then took a supporting role in The Little Flower, the first film after the Cultural Revolution, which earned her a Hundred Flower Award and won the hearts of many Chinese.
She spent the 80s performing in numerous movies and winning virtually every top acting award that China had to offer. A superstar and teenage idol, Liu was always followed by tons of fans.
Liu also created many "firsts"—the first actress in the Chinese mainland to cooperate with a Hong Kong director, the first hostess of the first CCTV Spring Festival Gala—which kept her at the center of attention throughout the 80s.
