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Eugenia Yuan's wooden faces

Eugenia Yuan at a press conference Monday to promote Three. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES

The young and beautiful starlet Eugenia Yuan (原麗淇) showed up in Taipei on Monday. For anyone who has seen Three, the Golden Horse nominee for Best Picture in which she plays a dead body, it might be hard to image Yuan alive, smiling and talking confidently about her experiences as an actress.

In Going Home, the third segment of Three, Yuan plays Hai-er, the dead wife of the character played by Leon Lai, who believes his wife will come back to life if he washes her body in a concoction of Chinese herbs for three years. So for 90 percent of the one-hour segment, Yuan is supposed to play dead, until the mystery unravels in the last 10 minutes and she opens her mouth to speak.

"It's not that difficult to play a dead body. The hardest part was holding my breath underwater, when I was soaked in the herbal solution in the film," Yuan who grew up in Los Angeles, said in her American-accented Mandarin. The role was Yuan's first as a lead actress. To portray a dead person under such circumstances, keeping stiff and motionless, was quite an impressive feat.

"I have to keep my eyes open, but make them look lifeless," Yuan said. On the set director Peter Chan even had an employee watch her to make sure she did not close her eyes. "Off set, I even dreamt that I could not close my eyes anymore," Yuan said.

In addition to being underwater and keeping her eyes open, Yuan also had to appear naked, having her body washed, brushed and massaged by Leon Lai. When asked about this, Yuan said she did not feel anything at when she was touched by the Hong Kong superstar. "I just felt very very cold!" she said.

Yuan's mother is Cheng Pei-pei (鄭佩佩), one of the reigning queens of Hong Kong kung-fu cinema, having starred in Come Drink with Me (大醉俠, 1976) and in the more recent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And this is probably one of the reasons why Yuan became an actress. "Mom helped by checking my Chinese dialogues," Yuan said.

Yuan began acting in 1996, and appeared in several television series in the US, including Beverly Hills 90210, Baywatch, NYPD Blue, and Sammo Hung's Martial Law. Her newest project is Miramax's war movie The Great Raid, starring Joseph Fiennes and Benjamin Bratt.
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