Born in December 1930 in Pingyao County, Shanxi Province to a poor family. At the age of six, she began to learn to sing Shanxi Zhonglu Bangzi, and made her debut at the age of seven at the Kaihua Temple Theater in Taiyuan, Shanxi. At the age of eleven, she went to Taiyuan with her troupe and performed in more than one hundred traditional operas, such as Li Sanniang Picking Water and Erdoumei, etc. She played the role of a singer and sat down well, and made her debut in opera performance.
In the fall of 1946, she left the opera troupe in Zhangjiakou and joined the Literary Troupe of the North China United University, where she began to engage in the new opera career.
In 1947, Guo Lanying entered the Theater Department of North China Union University and participated in performances while studying.
In August 1948, she was transferred to the Literary Troupe of North China University. In April 1949, she participated in the 2nd World Youth and Student Peace and Friendship Festival in Hungary with the Chinese Youth Delegation and won the prize for singing "Women's Freedom Song".
After the founding of New China in 1949, Guo Lanying worked successively as a principal actress at the Song and Dance Drama Theater attached to the Central Academy of Drama, the Central Experimental Opera House, and the China Opera and Dance Drama Theater, and served as a member of the 4th National Committee of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and as a member of the 2nd and 3rd Councils of the China National Association of Music. She starred in the new operas "The White Hairy Maiden", "Liu Hulan", "Spring Thunder", "Red Haze", "Marriage of Xiaoyihe", "Dou'e Grievance", etc., creating a series of vivid artistic images such as Xi'er, Xiaoqin, Liu Hulan, etc., which were popular among the general public, and she became one of the representative figures of the new operas in China. Guo Lanying also visited 20 countries, including the former Soviet Union, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy and Japan, as an emissary of Chinese art, contributing to cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.
Guo Lanying said goodbye to the stage in 1982 and went to teach at the China Conservatory of Music. 1986, she founded the Guo Lanying Art School in Guangdong and became its principal. 1989, she was honored with the first Golden Record Award.
Guo Lanying's voice is sweet, with a wide range, clear diction, and a rich rhythmic cadence, which is characteristic of Chinese folk singing. Since she received strict training as an opera singer when she was a teenager, she has a deep artistic background, and her singing has the beauty of the six arts: God, emotion, form, voice, accent and word. The characters she played achieved a high degree of harmony and unity between singing and acting, making a pioneering contribution to the establishment of China's new opera performance system. Her representative repertoire includes "Women's Freedom Song", "Wang Dama Wants Peace", "Turning the Tide", "Nanniwan", "Embroidered Gold Plaque", as well as the interlude "My Motherland" from the movie "Shangganling", and "A Path of Water, A Path of Mountain" from the opera "Liu Hulan".