Bai Ling Biography

Her father was a music teacher, and her mother was a stage actor and dancer. She describes herself as a very shy child who found that she best expressed herself through acting and performing. She was born during the Cultural Revolution when her parents were treated cruelly due to the fact that they were teachers. Soon after her birth, she moved to Sichuan to live with her grandmother. She became a "soldier" in the People's Liberation Army in Tibet at the age of 14. Her main activity there was to entertain with musical theater. She has starred in seven feature films and has appeared in many plays.

She came to New York in 1991 to attend New York University's film department as a visiting scholar. Since that time, she has appeared in a number of American movies including Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Beautiful Country (2003), My Baby's Mama (2003), and Paris (2003). Some of Bai Ling's early movies include Shan cun feng yue (1987), Hu guang (1988) as Jing Huan, The Crow (1994) as Myca, and Dead Funny (1994) as Noriko.

She filmed scenes for Star Wars: Episode III (2005) playing the role of a senator, but her role was cut during editing. She claimed that this was because of her posing nude for the June 2005 issue of Playboy magazine, whose appearance on newstands coincided with the movie's May 2005 release, but director George Lucas denied this, stating that the cut had been made more than a year earlier.

She was named one of People magazines "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" in 1998. She said that acting had been her dream but now a broken dream. Acting, she realized, is just another job, but "a great job." She has been quoted as saying that in acting, you can ignore how society tells you to behave and allow other parts within you to be expressed.

Although linked to Backstreet Boy Nick Carter with rumours spreading that Ling was engaged to him, Carter denied the rumours, and stated they were "just friends."

Later in 2005 Ling was a castmate of the VH1 program called But Can They Sing?. The show included several celebrities famous for thing other than singing. The show gave all these celebrities an attempt at singing on every episode and then the audience and home viewers got a chance to vote and on the next episode the contestant with the lowest number of votes was sent home. Bai Ling was most famous for her risquee and raunchy get ups. She sang very interesting versions of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated". Bai was eliminated just before the grand finale.

Ling was singled out for ridicule in an episode of The Showbiz Show with David Spade in late 2005. Spade noted that her high level of exposure in magazines and tabloids, frequently being photographed at movie premiers and parties, was not justified by the relatively minor roles she has been playing, and implied that she was engaging in desperate self-promotion.