 Actor Wang Zhiwen (王志文) was born in Shanghai on June 26, 1966 around the start of the Cultural Revolution. Although an active player in the city’s youth theatre scene for much of his adolescence, Wang was extremely reluctant about leaving his hometown for college and almost didn’t make the trip up north to audition for a spot on the Beijing Film Academy’s roster for the 1984-85 academic year class. Due to the overwhelming support of his high school teachers, however, Wang made a last minute decision to take part in the highly competitive selection process and soon earned a coveted place at the prestigious conservatory. Upon graduation in 1988 Wang was assigned to become a teacher at the Central Academy of Drama where he pursued various outside gigs to supplement his official career as a professional acting instructor.
Wang is known to many in the PRC as the former host of The World in Forty-five Minutes (《环球45分钟》) , a weekly news magazine program produced by CCTV that is still aired regularly today. Branching out into more professionally challenging work, Wang has acted in scores of TV shows and motion pictures not to mention his fair share of stage productions. He has even released a couple of musical albums that showcase his classically trained singing ability. Often playing worldly sophisticates whose jaded exteriors serve to mask passionately held convictions, Wang has been romantically linked with many of China’s top leading ladies whom often were his co-stars on marquee projects. Wang finally settled down in the spring of last year when he married runway model-turned-actress Chen Jianhong in a private ceremony among friends and relatives in Shanghai.
Wang is probably best known for his award-winning performance in Chen Kaige’s Together as the reclusive Professor Jiang, a world-weary music teacher who has withdrawn deeply into himself until a young violin prodigy prods him out of his self-created cocoon. In The Message he plays dramatically against type as Wang Tianxiang (王田香), a fierce turncoat who is now serving as a spymaster for the Imperial Japanese Army in charge of ferreting out spies working for either the Nationalists or the Communists embedded within the colonial puppet government. Wang pursues his targets with sadistic abandon, employing all means at his disposal to unearth shocking information for his Japanese military superiors.
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