Carina Lau

Carina Lau Kar-ling (; born 8 December 1966) is a Hong Kong-Canadian actress and singer. She started her acting career in TVB, before going on to achieve success in films after her 2nd year in college. She was notable in the 1980s for her girl-next-door type roles in films. She also plays Empress Wu Zetian in Tsui Hark's Detective Dee films, starting with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame in 2010. She has won Best Actress awards at the Hong Kong Film Award and Mainland China's Golden Rooster Awards, and has been nominated at Cannes Film Festival and Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards. Her husband is Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Lau frequently appears in the Hong Kong fashion scene and is a patron of many charities. Early life Lau was born on 1965 in Suzhou, Jiangsu, with her ancestral home in Rong County, Guangxi, to Liu Guiming (1940-2006) and Wang Fumei (1944-). Her grandfather, Liu Ji, moved to Thailand in 1935 to make a living and later moved to the country with his wife in 1938, just before the Canton Operation during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Lau's father, Liu Guiming, was born in Thailand on 1940. Lau's father returned to China in 1955 and with the help of All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, he studied at a junior high school in Guangzhou and high school in Suzhou. Following the start of Cultural Revolution in 1965, overseas Chinese who returned to China were targets of criticism. Lau's father moved to Hong Kong in 1976, while Lau moved to Hong Kong with her mother and brother in 1978, and joined TVB's acting class in 1983.