Fan Bingbing (, born 16 September 1981) is a Chinese actress. After gaining recognition for the costume drama My Fair Princess (1998–1999), Fan's breakthrough came with Feng Xiaogang's film Cell Phone (2003), which won her the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress. She followed with television series such as The Proud Twins (2004), Eight Heroes (2006), and The Empress of China (2014) while collaborating with Li Yu on art-house films such as Lost in Beijing (2007), Buddha Mountain (2011), Double Xposure (2012), and Ever Since We Love (2015). She reunited with Feng in I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016), which won her the Silver Shell for Best Actress and the Golden Rooster Award for Best Actress. Fan's international credits include My Way (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), The 355 (2022), Ice Road: Vengeance (2025), and Mother Bhumi (2025), for which she won the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress.
From 2013 to 2017, Fan was the highest-paid celebrity in the Forbes China Celebrity 100 list after ranking in the top 10 every year since 2006. She appeared on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in 2017. In 2018, Fan was involved in a tax evasion case, resulting in a CN¥883 million (US$127 million) tax liability and fine, as well as her blacklisting in mainland China. She has since shifted her focus in China to her brand Fan Beauty, while pursuing an acting career overseas.
Early life Fan was born in the coastal city of Qingdao, and moved to Yantai at 6 with her parents. Her paternal grandfather was a senior officer in the naval air force from Qingdao, stationed at the Yantai Laishan Airport division, while her grandmother gave her the Chinese character bing, or "ice," to honor the family's ties to the sea. Her father, Fan Tao, a former naval serviceman, was assigned to the Yantai Radio Factory after demobilization. After marrying Zhang Chuanmei (born Zhang Meili), one of eight sisters from a large family in Yantai, the couple were transferred to the Yantai Port Authority, where both worked as cadres in the cultural division. Following Zhang's layoff, Fan resigned, and the couple started a clothing business together. During Fan's childhood, her maternal grandfather, a carpenter, often cared for her while her parents were occupied with their business. Fan has a younger brother nineteen years her junior, Fan Chengcheng. Her parents were fined for violating China's one-child policy when he was born in 2000. He was a member of boy groups Nine Percent and NEXT before pursuing a solo career mainly as an actor.
Fan grew up watching her father sing at local competitions and cultural events, sometimes in bars to supplement the family income. Her mother, passionate about dance since childhood and a former member of the Red Guards propaganda troupe, was devoted to Fan's artistic education and arranged piano and flute lessons for her. Despite academic underperformance, Fan skipped a grade in her second year of middle school and was admitted to the music talent class of Yantai No. 1 High School for her outstanding musical performance, though some sources suggested that her admission was aided by her mother's connections with the school's staff. While in middle school, Fan lived for several years in the home of her flute teacher Zhang Chunqian, a close friend of her mother from their time in the Red Guards, as her parents were occupied with their clothing business. Zhang, who also served as the high school's wind-orchestra director, encouraged Fan's artistic talent and appointed her as the orchestra's conductor.
As a young girl, Fan was captivated by the Taiwanese television drama The Empress of the Dynasty, starring Angela Pan as Wu Zetian, which gave her the early dream of, if not becoming an actress, at least being like the star. In 1995, during her second year of high school, Fan was involved in a car accident. Her parents took her to Shanghai for surgery, and she spent three months recuperating in a hospital. Back to Yantai, she learned about Shanghai Xie Jin-Hengtong School of Arts in the local newspaper. Unable to advance to her senior year for the college entrance exam due to the accident, and unwilling to repeat her second year of high school, Fan applied to the performance school, and on the day of the entrance interviews, she was noticed in the crowd by the founder and director, Xie Jin, who advanced her past the preliminary and secondary auditions straight to the final round. At 15, she joined the school's third cohort as one of its youngest students.
Career
1996–2006: Early work and breakthrough Fan debuted in the television series Powerful Woman (1997), where she met the lead actress Leanne Liu, who recommended her for the television series My Fair Princess (1998–1999). The two seasons of costume drama, in which she plays a supporting role as a princess's handmaiden, became a runaway success and brought her recognition across the Chinese-speaking world.
On the eve of the shooting of My Fair Princess in 1997, at the age of 16, Fan signed with Chiung Yao, the Taiwanese writer and showrunner. After Fan rose to fame with the costume drama, her parents closed their clothing business and moved to Beijing to support her acting career, becoming her early agents. Fan broke up with Chiung Yao in 1999, following a high-profile contractual dispute that arose after she signed on to Jia Yun's productions without going through her agency. Fan and her mother filed for termination with the agency, which countersued Fan for unilaterally terminating the contract and demanded a compensation fee of . Through court mediation, Fan settled the contract termination with the agency by paying in compensation, reportedly the life savings of her parents at the time, who had just bought a house in Beijing.
In the same year, she was promised with five TV series in three years by Jia Yun, a family friend and founder of Zhejiang Pi Ka Wang Group, a leather and furniture manufacturer which later gained prominence in entertainment business. Jia became a key supporter during the early stage of Fan's career, though her slate of television projects under his company failed to gain traction. Their relationship apparently soured after rumors circulated about a romantic or "kept" relationship between them. When Fan's contract with him expired, her family publicly accused Jia of exploiting her for self-promotion. Jia was placed on a wanted list in 2007 for "illegally absorbing public deposits," and he turned himself in in 2015.
In 1999, while shooting TV series Qingchun Chudong produced by Jia, Fan was introduced by co-actors Li Bingbing and Ren Quan to their manager Wang Jinghua, one of China's earliest and most powerful managers. In June 2000, Fan signed with Wang, and followed her next year to join in Huayi Brothers, where Wang became the head of its talent management. In 2002, Fan established Huairou Fanbingbing Film & Television Art Training School and a production and publicity company, both in the charge of her mother. In 2003, Fan starred in Feng Xiaogang's Cell Phone, which became China's highest-grossing film of the year and earned her the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress. Fan also appeared in films such as The Lion Roars (2002), The Twins Effect II (2004), A Chinese Tall Story (2005), and A Battle of Wits (2006), for which she received a nomination for Best Actress at the 12th Golden Bauhinia Awards. In 2006, Forbes China awarded her the Star of the Year.
Fan's tenure at Huayi Brothers, China's leading entertainment conglomerate in the 2000s, was marked by tensions between her rapidly rising stardom and the corporate machinery. Although she benefited from Huayi's strong film production network, the company's lack of adequate public-relations support and personal attention left her frustrated, particularly after her role as a mistress in Cell Phone drew increasingly negative and often salacious publicity. In 2004, she faced her first public-relations crisis when Chongqing Business Daily published an article implying her "casting-couch" transaction. Fan urged Huayi to issue an immediate statement, but the company responded only days later, leading to a newspaper retraction that came well past the news cycle. In 2006, a viral post making similar allegations appeared on Tianya. This time Fan took the initiative with the help of Mu Xiaoguang (also known as Mou Enguang), a Taiwanese businessman with reputed ties with the Four Seas Gang, who befriended Fan when he was producer of the TV series The Legend and the Hero (2007). Mu identified the posters as two middle-school students in Shaanxi Province by tracing the IP address and registration data. The two teenagers admitted to acting on instructions from another actress and issued a public apology to Fan. Fan later stated that she had identified the actress involved but chose not to disclose her name.
In 2005, Fan's powerful manager Wang Jinghua left Huayi to co-found Chengtian Entertainment, triggering an exodus of talent and a shake-up across the industry. Fan chose to remain with Huayi, reportedly persuaded by the company's promise to cast her opposite Chow Yun-fat in the historical epic A Battle of Wits (2006), though the lead role ultimately went to Andy Lau. After Wang's departure, her protégé Li Xue, sister of Li Bingbing, who also remained with Huayi, took over as Huayi's head of talent management. The unfavorable internal competition facing Fan intensified as Zhou Xun joined Huayi. Amid rumors that her contractual negotiations had broken down, Fan largely skipped the promotion of her final project with Huayi, The Matrimony (2007), which was released around the same time her contract expired.
2007–2017: Heyday Fan left Huayi Brothers in February 2007 to establish her own Fan Bingbing Studio, a pioneering example of the one-person agency model in the Chinese entertainment industry, with Mu Xiaoguang as her manager and Yang Tianzhen as head of public relations. Fan starred in eight films in 2007, including Shinjuku Incident and Bodyguards and Assassins, the latter of which earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards.
Notably, Fan collaborated with director Li Yu for the first time in Lost in Beijing (2007), beginning a long-term artistic partnership and close friendship. The film, one of the most high-profile cases challenging Chinese film censorship, was selected for the main competition of the 57th Berlin International Film Festival. In response to the submission of its uncensored version to the festival without prior approval, Chinese authorities blocked its domestic release, which had originally been scheduled for May 2007. It was also submitted for consideration at the 44th Golden Horse Awards, but later withdrawn under pressure from Beijing, which that year barred films solely financed by mainland Chinese companies from competing for the Taiwanese awards. According to that year's Golden Horse chair, Peggy Chiao, Lost in Beijing would have received seven nominations had it not been withdrawn. Fan was still nominated for and won Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Matrimony, though she did not attend the ceremony. In late 2007, a censored version of Lost in Beijing was finally cleared for release in China, but it had only a brief theatrical run before being pulled from cinemas and banned in early 2008.