Feeling the limitations of “ethnic appearance”, she plays the role of Asian women so that we forget about the origin of her heroines. True to his Chinese roots, he speaks three European languages and Japanese. A well-known actress, she also made herself known as an artist… Lucy Liu is clearly one of the best inhabitants of our planet – one of those who believe that harmony is possible.
I like this clear difference. Between her on the screen and her standing in front of me. Between the “dragon woman” and the woman in black jeans…
In the TV series Ally McBeal, which brought her fame, she was a terrible woman. In Kill Bill, she was a scary woman. In “Charlie’s Angels” she was a woman-motor, in the current “Elementary” – Dr. Watson himself. That is, such as Dr. Watson should be – solid as a rock.
But the woman in front of me is sweet, shy, soft. She has freckles and a shy smile. She does not look like her screen version, nor the heroine of the Chinese miniature, with which she is really drawn to be compared – because of her skin the color of the whitest Chinese porcelain. But no, it doesn’t look like either. This smiling, but serious woman, restrained in facial expressions and movements, has no analogues at all. No one, having her initial data, has made such a career. Few people, having made such a career, retained the modesty instilled in their upbringing. No one else in my professional life has agreed to an interview right the next day without letting me know that there are more important things to do … And here is Lucy Liu standing in front of the window of her suite in the penthouse suite of the luxurious Carlisle Hotel on the Upper East Side, and it seems that she, short, muscular , narrow-faced, in black jeans, a black shirt and black low shoes, sits high on a wire like a black bird and looks around the city with a masterly look. And it’s about to fly. And she will soar over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, where she loves to come, “because there is no time”, over the Dakota House, where her beloved John Lennon lived, “who never spared time for anything”, over Queens, where her poor immigrant childhood passed, when “time was the main tyrant” …
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In an atmosphere of gilded luxury of Art Deco, as if insisting on the undivided power of “today” and denying “after”, it is somehow uncomfortable to hear constant reminders of the time. Lucy Liu doesn’t have enough time for something? Or is it age? Or regret about what was not done? But what is time for a man who, by the age of 45, has done so much and achieved so much without having a profitable launch pad? Why is it here with us in this penthouse chic?
Lucy Liu: No, I’m talking about time, because somewhere deep down I have a sense of humiliation from our dependence on it. We are afraid to miss time, it is always not enough for us, as if the present bites off our future. And you know, after all, time is a female category, it is nature that reminds us every month that it is coming, that we may not be in time … That we are losing attractiveness is also the nature of our species: a female must attract a male … I get so upset when I see living evidence that a woman is subject to this call of nature – when I see this obsession with youth, when I catch acquaintances carefully looking at photos in glossy magazines. But by God, we are people, not males and females, is it really so difficult to understand and accept the inevitable: that time just goes by, that you need to live in spite of this, that our age is finite, and this is definitely something – unlike from the methods of combating cellulite? And that – in fact – only “now” exists. And this “now” does not shorten the beautiful “tomorrow” at all.
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Her (un)abstract dream
Ten years ago, having already become a sought-after actress, Liu felt that she could make her dream come true. She has been making collages since the age of 16: “Cutting out images of the most beautiful and inaccessible objects from magazines and creating her own girlish reality from them,” Liu says. The actress’s ideas about reality have changed since then, but her passion for expressing herself through plastic art has remained. And she entered the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture), which she graduated in 2006.
Lucy Liu is an author of collages, drawings, photographs, mixed media, tempera and oils. Under her Chinese name, Yu Ling, she has participated in several group exhibitions, and in 2011, London’s Salon Vert Gallery held her first solo exhibition, “72”. It featured oil paintings “with the introduction of small, funny, found in landfill objects”, as the author describes them. In 2013, the second solo exhibition “Totem” followed, which presented Liu’s works on linen, “expressing the full extent of the fragility of human beings.” The royalties received from the sale of her work, Liu invariably transfers to UNICEF, whose ambassador she became in 2004. V. B.
Psychologies Many people call to live “here and now”, we also often write about it. But, to be honest, I know few people who are really guided by this wise attitude in their daily life.
L.L.: And I am not guided. Now I just don’t have a chance to live differently. In 1991, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor said that you need to do an operation and not delay it. Learning about cancer was a shock and isolation. It was like there was a wall between me and the rest of the world. The world has become an enemy. It’s good that it didn’t last long – the operation was done two days later … And it turned out that the tumor was benign. No cancer. But the experience stayed with me. I started living today. I stopped looking forward to an indefinitely beautiful future. I don’t see why putting off happiness for the sake of tomorrow might be even better. I consider every day important. And all the days are taken into account – there are no unsuccessful or empty ones. For me now there is only the present. There is no past and no future, it’s just not-present. I began to live … faster, more intensively, more definitely. I still don’t like to say “no”, let’s say, it’s always unpleasant for me to refuse roles, in “no” there is some kind of imbalance, comfort. But now I can say yes more easily. And besides, I heard so many rejections (in our work they are inevitable, and with my “ethnic” appearance their number triples), that in general I began to focus more on “yes” – on accepting rather than rejecting.
Maybe the feeling of humiliating dependence on time is also due to the fact that you are 44 and you do not have children. Natural feminine feeling: my biological time is running out.
L.L.: Such a simple argument… Too simple! I feel the absence of children in a different way. I would like to have children, but I am a supporter of naturalness. I’m American, but in many ways Chinese. She was raised in a Chinese family. Yes, my parents are educated people (although in the USA they were forced to take on any job, my dad was a trader for a long time), but they are Chinese. And the Chinese attitude is such that children are the highest value, because they are a natural continuation of life. They are not planned, their birth is not timed to a convenient life situation, they are born because they can be born. By the way, this is precisely why the people in China react so painfully to the policy of birth control, to forced female contraception – because, according to the people’s worldview, this is violence against nature, against the natural progression of life. And in my life, naturally, children did not appear. Well, it didn’t happen. And this is not bad and not good – it happened, and that’s it. But I’m generally not inclined to force life circumstances. I have learned to just accept them.
From your interviews, I concluded that you have a difficult attitude towards the very idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbfamily and that you, your sister and brother are not very used to parental care …
L.L.: All forces were spent on survival. We were poor, lived in not very prosperous Queens. You know, I recently drove through Queens and saw our house in Jackson Heights – so small, sad. There was a strange feeling – as if I had watched an old movie … Yes, we survived. And the times were not happy. Parents were not up to our painstaking upbringing. They had to earn money – after all, there are three of us. And our business was not to cause them trouble, well, not to disappoint them. We had to adapt to the environment, to the school, to the district – so that the parents would not have problems.
But surely you wanted to share this with someone?
L.L.: There was no need to share. I remember when I was little – my mother cut my hair almost to zero. And the other girls had long hair, and I really wanted long hair! Mom thought the American school was a breeding ground for head lice. There was something terrible in this – to be a child, and without sex … But I did not mind, because even then it was clear: there are more important things. Then, when we grew up, my classmates got a figure, but I don’t. And I didn’t envy the fact that someone had breasts – I’m not a white woman, everything is different with them. But I was terribly jealous of the hair on the hands of the girls. It was female maturity – in my then understanding. And no, it didn’t even occur to me to talk to my sister: we discussed only practical things. In our family, it was not customary to talk about emotions – somehow too petty in the face of our problems. And then, in Chinese education, the emphasis is on education. As an adult, I saw how people celebrate their birthdays for weeks, and I thought: that’s narcissism! In our country, birthdays were not celebrated at all – and these “birth weeks” amazed me. And then I realized: you are celebrating that you are alive! And that’s reason enough to celebrate. And the holidays must go on.
Chinese literacy
Lucy Alexis Liu was born December 2, 1968 in the New York area of Queens in a family of emigrants from China (her father, a civil engineer by profession, came to the United States from Beijing, her mother, a biochemist, from Shanghai). Brought up in the spirit of achievement characteristic of Chinese emigrants, following her older brother and sister, she graduated from one of the best schools in New York – Stuyvesant High School, which, as a rule, only get excellent students.
Went to New York University but transferred to the University of Michigan, where she graduated as a specialist in Asian languages and cultures. In the late 80s, during a trip to the subway, she was invited to shoot in commercials. And it was in commercials that Liu played her first roles.
The actress became known to the public only in 1998. as the bitchy lawyer on Ally McBeal, and real fame came to her after the comic blockbuster McG’s Charlie’s Angels (2000) and the role of the ruthless “dragon woman” in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003). With age, Liu is clearly more and more drawn to roles that are psychological and related to social reality – these are precisely her roles as a policewoman in the TV series Southern Territory (2009–2013), which survived 5 seasons, and Elementary (since 2012), where Liu plays New Yorker Joan Watson, a realist, a former neurosurgeon, who is assigned as a doctor-supervisor to a brilliant drug addict detective, but becomes his friend and assistant.
Did your plans to become an actress come as a shock to your parents?
L.L.: Naturally, they did not meet this understanding. They fought all their lives and waited for me to continue to fight at a new level. They won their lives in America, it was logical for us, their children, to win a different position, life guarantees. Doctor, lawyer, yes. Actress? Is she the one who has a high opinion of herself, but always works part-time as a waitress? I would not have become an actress – it was already impossible to live with my parents after university, and there was nothing to rent a house. Brother saved. He said: live with me. And he himself was a student and lived in an apartment without a kitchen, and besides, he shared it with a friend. I slept on a mattress, rolled it up during the day. But it was a great time – filled. I have learned to appreciate failure as an experience. I learned what real support is from my brother and his neighbor. They also fed me.
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Fame, money – how did they affect you? What did you experience when you started getting high fees?
L.L.: I am a child of immigrants, which means I am a materialist. And the main thing that changed then was my capabilities. Much has become possible. And money… You know, I am attracted to passionate and purposeful people. To people who do a thing that they consider important. For whom money is not a guide. The secondary importance of money – maybe this is also from past poverty? That is, some people have greed because of poverty, but I have something that I still did not understand: what is money? When I became more or less famous, gifts from different companies began to arrive. Well, cosmetics… And I didn’t even know how to take them. I gave everything to someone. And then I thought: why not open the box and find out what kind of soap-cream-mascara is there? Even if I don’t need soap right now. You see, when you get used to having a lack of everything, you continue to live in lack. Strange program.
There is such a version that rich people who have come out of poverty feel wealth differently than those born millionaires?
L.L.: Poverty dictates asceticism. Sometimes it comes to the point of absurdity. My mom, for example. She is used to denying herself everything. I gave her so many things, but she, in my opinion, never wore anything. Then irritation appeared on her leg, and I told her: this is from synthetics, wear natural fabrics. And she: what I wore, I will wear, natural is expensive. Four years ago I made my debut on Broadway. Wonderful performance “God of Massacre”. I invite mom. She insists that she will buy the ticket herself. The performance ends, I’m waiting for her. She is not. I’m calling: where are you? Her: Oh, I didn’t mean to bother you. Well, of course, she was sitting somewhere in the gallery, and then she left so as not to “disturb” me. I almost burst into tears: she did not understand that she was not just an audience, that she was special! Mom was born and raised in China. And in a way, it’s still there.
It occurred to me just now … It is believed that the stars protect their personal lives from the curiosity of the crowd, but at your expense I had a hunch: isn’t the modesty of this, my mother’s kind, forcing you to carefully hide your personal life?
L.L.: Yes, I’m not Nicole Kidman, not a romantic star! I’m not that interested.
That is, you, as a mother, are not special?
L.L.: …And in a sense, I still live in Queens.
Complimentary: Watson
“I didn’t want to play in this series at all, because I didn’t believe at all that the viewer was ready to see such a reading of the classics,” Lucy Liu now admits. And imagine, she is talking about the TV series “Elementary” and about her Dr. Watson, a neurosurgeon who retired from operations. Liu clearly underestimated us: we were not only ready to accept a woman as Holmes’ colleague, but also fell in love with such a Watson. That is why the American television channel CBS extended the series, first for the second, and then for the third season, the shooting of which began at the end of July. Previous episodes can be viewed on the Channel One website (1tv.ru/cinema/fi=7801).