sheer cover

Ming-Na Wen (Traditional Chinese: 溫明娜, Simplified Chinese: 温明娜; pinyin: Wēn Míngnuó; born November 20, 1963) is an American actress. She has been credited with and without her surname, but most credits since the late 1990s have been without her surname.

Biography

Early life

She was born in Coloane, Macau (a Chinese territory under Portuguese administration at the time) and moved to the United States as a young girl with her mother (her parents divorced when she was a toddler). She attended high school in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and graduated with a BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon University.

Career

Playing Lien Hughes on As the World Turns, she was the first Asian-American to be a regular on a daytime soap opera. Her most prominent role may be as Dr. Jing-Mei "Deb" Chen on ER. Ming-Na appeared in the movie version of Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club and played Chun-Li in Street Fighter. She also appeared in a supporting role on the comedy series The Single Guy which starred Jonathan Silverman.

Ming-Na also provided the voice for the title character in Disney's animated movie Mulan as well as reprising her role in the Square Enix/Disney videogame Kingdom Hearts II, Aki Ross in the computer animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and Detective Ellen Yin in the animated series The Batman.

In fall 2005, she starred on the NBC television series Inconceivable as the lead character, Rachel Lu. However, the series was cancelled after only a few episodes. Her next TV role will be an FBI agent in the forthcoming kidnap drama Vanished, which premieres in the fall of 2006.

Personal life

Her first marriage (1990 - 1993) to Kirk Aanes, a playwright, ended in divorce.

She has been married since June 16, 1995 to Eric Michael Zee, whom she met at the premiere of The Joy Luck Club. The couple have a daughter named Michaela, born November 21, 2000 and a son named Cooper Dominic, born October 12, 2005.

Selected filmography

Trivia

• Ming-Na is a Star Wars superfan as revealed on VH-1's "When Star Wars Ruled the World".

• Ming-Na appears on an infomercial for Sheer Cover, a mineral base make-up product. She took off her make-up during the commercial and demonstrated the ease of using the product. The infomercial is still running regularly as of August 2006.

• Ming-Na's husband Eric Zee is a screenwriter. The couple manages an all-Asian boy band named At Last. At Last was a finalist on the reality TV show America's Got Talent.

External links

• Official site
• Ming-Na at the Internet Movie Database
• Ming-Na at the Voice Chasers Database
• Ming-Na interview