The first time I knew about Yang Zishan was in "To Our Lasting Youth".
At that time, I always thought she was an actress from Taiwan, and I know that later on, I inadvertently looked up her Baidu encyclopedia once and realized that she was from Nanjing.
And she started out as a singer, winning second place in the national finals of the singing reality variety show "Master and Mistress" in 2007, but it seems that her status as a singer didn't make her more famous.
So she turned to TV and movie acting. To Youth" is her most famous work, but since I'm a post-90s girl, I don't know much about the post-80s student era, so I didn't have much emotional ****ing after I watched the drama, and my impression of the female lead was that she was just an actress who looked kinda easy on the eyes.
It wasn't until '14, when her movie "Back to 20" with Lu Han was released, that I noticed the actress once again, this time in the Chinese version of the critically acclaimed Korean movie "Strange Her".
Yang plays Meng Lijun, a grandmother who returns to her twenties and becomes younger, and she gets into a murky love triangle with her grandson and the director of a music company.
She vividly portrayed the story of an elderly singer who returns to her youth and pursues her dream of becoming a musician.
Specifically, near the end of the movie, in order to donate blood to her grandson who was involved in a car accident, she gave up her youthful status and went back to her old age, which really touched me quite a bit and reminded me of my grandmother.
I was wondering after watching the movie how Yang Zishan, who started out as a singer, could contribute such an infectious performance in the movie.
Later I went to see her experience since she entered the entertainment industry, and realized how much effort and sweat she contributed to this superb acting, and that these appreciations never came out of thin air.
Seeing the news of her marriage, she looked really beautiful in her wedding dress, be happy all the time.