The Actress: A Gamble Worth Taking; After keeping a low profile for five years, Gong Li appears in not one but two new films by director Wong Kar-wai.

Byline: Dana Thomas

For most of the 1990s, Gong Li was China's leading lady. Starring in such films as "Farewell My Concubine," "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"-- the latter two directed by her then boyfriend, Zhang Yimou--she helped bring Chinese film into the international mainstream and set a new standard for delicate, stirring female performances. But then she split with Zhang and married Singaporean businessman Ooi Hoe Seong in 1996, taking a break from cinema. In the last five years she's made only one movie and appeared as a model for L'Oreal.

Now 38, Gong Li is back--and in a Wong Kar-wai double feature, no less. She has a potent role in "2046" as a Cambodian gambler and costars with Chang Chen in the Wong-directed episode of "Eros," a three-part film about sex and love (Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni directed the two other sections), which Wong hopes will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. In "2046" Gong Li is nearly unrecognizable, with her hair whipped into a gravity-defying beehive and her makeup as stark as an ace of hearts. But her powerfully restrained acting style is as mature and distinctive as ever. To prepare for her role as a gambler she disguised herself and hung out at the casinos in Macao, learning the art of the bluff. "She wanted to know exactly who this woman was," Wong recalls. "She asked, 'What is her motivation? What does she look like?' Gong Li is very precise, and this makes her very powerful in front of the camera."

She got there by chance. The youngest of five children, Gong Li enrolled as a teen at Beijing's ...