Cong Shan

Biography

Cong Shan is a former Chinese actress born in Beijing in 1962, who later emigrated to France. Her ancestral home is Pengla in Shandong Province, and her parents were both Kunqu opera performers. She graduated from the Acting Department of the Central Academy of Drama in China. She rose to fame in China by co-starring with Zhu Shimao in the film "The Herdsman," adapted from Zhang Xianliang's novel "Soul and Body," in which she played the female lead, Li Xiuzhi, a young woman who fled famine from Sichuan. The film won the Ministry of Culture's Outstanding Feature Film Award in 1982. In 1987, she received a French government scholarship to study theatre in France. She starred in the film "A Da" in 1992 and appeared in several French and German films in the 1990s, including "Porte du ciel, La," "Tour Eiffel," and "Piste du télégraphe, La." In 2008, she reunited with Zhu Shimao in the film "A Room for Two," considered a sequel to "The Herdsman." In 2009, she appeared in the popular TV series "Who Controls My Youth." Her Taiwanese representative work is the 1993 series "The Legend of Empress Dowager Cixi."