This is the 46th instalment in a biweekly series profiling major Hong Kong pop culture figures of recent decades. Ten years ago, if you asked the average Hongkonger to describe Fala Chen, they would say she was a pretty face on Hong Kong television station TVB, one who joined the city’s entertainment industry after winning a beauty pageant. Now she is known as one of only a few Hong Kong screen stars to have made it in Hollywood, thanks to international blockbusters such as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024). Interestingly, a career in the limelight was never on the cards for her until she stumbled upon it at university. Chen was born in 1982 and raised in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Her paternal grandfather Chen Xuan was an opera singer from a Shanghai merchant family, and she learned traditional Chinese dance from the age of four. In a 2016 interview, she said that she was “the worst kid you could ask for” and “did the opposite of everything my parents asked me to do”. Luckily, she added, her parents allowed her, their only child, to “discover the world on my own”. At 14, she and her parents immigrated to Atlanta, in the US state of Georgia and in 2001, when she was 19, she went to university to study marketing and international business. She entered the Miss Asian America beauty pageant in her first summer as a university student “solely for monetary reasons”, Chen said, “because winners were to get scholarships”. As such, she flew to California for her first beauty contest, representing the state of Georgia. There, she was crowned Miss Asian America 2002. That led to more pageants, and she was named runner-up and Miss Chinese Chamber of Commerce at Miss Chinatown USA 2003, and took home the title of Miss NY Chinese 2004. The win that would change the trajectory of her life came at the Miss Chinese International pageant in 2005, when she represented New York in the competition, held in Hong Kong. Her second place win landed her an eight-year contract with TVB, Hong Kong’s leading broadcasting company, and launched her entertainment career. Chen later recalled: “It was my fourth year in college and, to avoid the tedious business- school recruiting process, I was like ‘OK, I’ll go to Hong Kong and become an actress so I don’t have to sit in an office. This sounds great.’” She began her time at TVB by hosting variety shows in Mandarin Chinese before she went on to act in Cantonese-speaking dramas. In a 2021 interview, she said: “The very first day on set [playing a small role in a crime drama] was the day when I caught the bug for acting. I was almost certain on that day that acting was the thing I wanted to do.” In both 2007 and 2010, she took home best supporting actress in the TVB Anniversary Awards, an annual ceremony honouring performers in the station’s television programming, for her roles in dramas Steps and No Regrets. She has starred in a number of other successful TVB productions, including the 2008 family drama Moonlight Resonance, 2012 period piece Queens of Diamonds and Hearts and 2013’s aviation series Triumph in the Skies II. In 2010, she received a best newcomer nomination in the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards for her debut film appearance in director Herman Yau Lai-to’s Turning Point, a film spin-off of a well-loved Hong Kong crime drama series. Despite her busy schedule, Chen did not neglect her love life – in 2007, she secretly married Hong Kong businessman-turned-actor Daniel Suek, also known as Sit Sai-hang. She kept her personal life private, making her first public appearance with her husband only in 2011. The pair divorced in 2013. In 2012, Chen ventured into music with Beautiful Life, a Cantonese-language studio album which she later called “more like an experiment”. It was at this point that she felt herself at something of a crossroads. In 2013, she said: “I’d still give my all in acting, which I’ve been doing all this while. I’ve always been kind of lost. Somehow, I feel even more lost when I work with experienced veteran stars. It makes me wonder what the meaning of my job is. Am I here to pursue my personal satisfaction or to entertain people?” In 2014, perhaps to combat the lack of career clarity she spoke of, she left Hong Kong to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in acting at the Juilliard School in New York. She graduated from the four-year programme in 2018 – reportedly the first person of Chinese descent to do so. Not long after, she was cast to appear alongside Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in the US psychological miniseries The Undoing (2020). It was a new chapter for her – personally as well as professionally. In May 2019, she announced on Instagram that she had married French technology entrepreneur Emmanuel Straschnov in Paris. In February 2021, she welcomed her first child, a daughter, in a natural birth; and in March 2024, at 42, she gave birth to her son. In 2020, it was announced that she would appear in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Marvel’s first superhero movie with a predominantly East and Southeast Asian cast that included Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who both also rose to fame in Hong Kong cinema. The film met with critical acclaim upon release and put Chen further on the map. In 2022, she starred in Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep, a miniseries spin-off of a 1996 film of the same name. Unfortunately, Chen could not avoid being typecast. “After Shang-Chi, my agents started getting more calls about characters who only speak Chinese,” she told the Post in 2022. “I wouldn’t get roles that weren’t written for an Asian person … I have a lot more than that to share as a human, but unfortunately, that kind of casting is still a work in progress in this industry.” That is not to say, however, that work has dried up. Aside from her recent role in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong, one of Chen’s latest projects is The Ballad of a Small Player, a gambling thriller based primarily in Macau but also shot in Hong Kong. The Netflix film starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton is directed by Edward Berger, who is known for titles such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave. Filming wrapped in the second half of 2024 and it is set to come out towards the end of 2025. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook