Takeshi Kaneshiro

Takeshi Kaneshiro was born on October 11, 1973, in Taipei, Taiwan, to a Japanese father and a Taiwanese mother; he holds Japanese citizenship and is fluent in Mandarin, Japanese and Hokkien, with conversational Cantonese and English. He attended Taipei Japanese Junior High School and then Taipei American School, leaving before graduation after he began appearing in television commercials as a teenager.

He signed as a pop singer in 1992, releasing the Mandarin-language album Heartbreaking Night under the nickname "Aniki," and made his film debut in 1993 in Executioners. His breakthrough came in 1994 with Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, in which he played a heartbroken police officer who phones old girlfriends and buys tins of pineapple nearing their expiration date. In 1998 he won Best Actor at the Television Drama Academy Awards for God, Please Give Me More Time.

Kaneshiro went on to work with several of Chinese-language cinema's most prominent directors: he starred opposite Zhang Ziyi and Andy Lau in Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers (2004), played the lead in the musical Perhaps Love (2005) — for which he won Best Original Film Song at the Golden Horse Awards for the track "Crossroad" — and appeared as military strategist Zhuge Liang in John Woo's two-part historical epic Red Cliff (2008–2009).

He was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018 and won Best Actor at the Golden Screen Awards in 2017 for This Is Not What I Expected.