The famous performance artist Li Wei has been an artist since he was 20 years old, and has starred in and participated in more than 50 films in more than 60 years, including "Spring in a Small Town", "My Life", "Stage Sisters", "Ju Dou", "The Last Emperor" and other immortal business cards, and his screen image is also good and evil, known as "the screen man with a thousand faces".
He has collaborated with the second to fifth generation of famous Chinese directors: Shen Xiling, Fei Mu, Shi Hui, Sun Yu, Chen Xihe, Bai Shen, Tao Jin, Gu Jie, Liu Qiong, Xie Jin, Wang Yan, Cen Fan, Wu Tianming, Zhang Yimou, Zhang Jianya... There is also the famous Italian director Bertolucci, which is enough to show Li Wei's extraordinary strength.
On October 25, 1919, Li Wei was born in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, his ancestral home was Changzhou, Jiangsu, his original name was Li Zhiyuan, and his family moved to Beiping. Li Wei has been intelligent and studious since childhood, and has always been obsessed with Peking Opera, but his father opposed his son to become a dramatist, locked him up in junior high school for half a year, and did not allow him to go out to study opera.
In 1938, Li Wei took a boat to Chongqing to apply for a university, and on the boat he met the famous director Sun Yu, who influenced his life's career, and talked speculatively. Sun Yu saw that Li Wei was sunny and handsome, so he said to him, if you can't go to school, come and act.
When Li Wei arrived in Chongqing, the school examination period had passed, and he was not qualified to go to school, so he went to join Sun Yu and played a pilot in "Long Sky" starring Sun Yu, Jin Yan, Wei Heling, Bai Yang, Wang Renmei and other big stars, and from then on embarked on the road of acting.
Li Wei entered the China Film Studio as a basic actor, and cooperated with Chen Tianguo, Shu Xiuwen, Qin Yi and other famous actors in films such as "Protecting hometown", "Good Husband", "Chinese Children", "Chicken Singing Early to See the Sky", "Six Memories of Floating Life" and so on.
In 1942, Li Wei joined Ying Yunwei's "China Drama Art Society" and performed more than 40 dramas such as "Peacock Bile", "The Flower of Tang Di", "Leaving the Grass", "Returning to the People in the Night of wind and snow", and "Rejuvenation of the Earth", and played with Shu Xiuwen, Zhang Ruifang, Bai Yang and Qin Yi, who are famous for the "Four Famous Dans" of the Chongqing Drama Stage.
During the eight years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Li Wei had been acting in Chongqing and the rear area, running rivers and lakes, and had seen all kinds of characters in the three religions and nine streams, accumulating rich life experience until he returned to Shanghai in 1946.
In 1948, Li Wei played the young doctor Zhang Zhichen in Fei Mu's "Spring in a Small Town", which contained the emotional waves of the undercurrent in tranquility, the blending of scenes, and the collision of old and new ethical and moral concepts in stark contrast, portraying the repression and desolation of people's hearts into three points, creating a precedent for "poetic film" in the history of Chinese cinema.
At that time, the Anti-Japanese War had just ended, the mainstream of the film industry was a huge film such as "A River of Spring Water Flowing East", and the quiet and melancholy "Spring in a Small Town" was ignored at that time, until it was rediscovered when it was released abroad in 1997, and its artistic value soared, and it was rated as "the world's top ten classic business cards" by the world's authoritative film organizations.
In the 100th anniversary of Chinese films, it was rated as the first place in 100 classic Chinese films, gaining the charm of transcending time. "Spring in a Small Town" has become an immortal classic of Chinese cinema and has also established Li Wei's position in the history of cinema. After the founding of new China, Li Wei became an actor in the Shanghai Film Studio.
From 1950 to 1964, Li Wei starred in films such as "My Life", "Sister Sister Stand Up", "South Island Storm", "Mother", "Nurse's Diary", "The Legend of Luban", "Fire Song", "Who is the Abandoned Person", "Soldier 51 Station", "Flying Knife Hua", "Stage Sisters" and other films.
His initial roles in the studio were almost all villains, such as the traitor in "South Island Storm", the traitor Ma Fugen in "Soldier Station 51", the rogue drama manager Tang in "Stage Sisters"... Later, he and Zhang Ruifang's husband Yan Li wrote a script "Flying Knife Hua", and finally played a positive character.
Li Wei played Hua Shaojie, an acrobat with extraordinary skills, in "Flying Knife Hua", he went to the acrobatic troupe to practice for 6 hours a day, and learned flying knives and whips with acrobats, practicing eight or nine inseparable. After the film was released, it caused a sensation and became famous.
Li Wei is a natural actor and has no other hobbies except acting. He said that in the line of acting as an actor, he must have a job in his hands, have real skills, and be good at integrating the characters observed in life into the roles, and interpreting the characters richly and colorfully.
Xie Jin, who collaborated with him on "Stage Sisters", admired Li Wei's performance very much, saying that young actors should learn from Li Wei. In 1957, Li Wei won the second prize of the Ministry of Culture's Excellent Film Award for his outstanding performance in "My Life". During the special period of ten years, Li Wei was isolated and censored in the cadre school for three years and left the big screen.
In the late 1970s, Chinese films ushered in the second spring, and the actors of Li Wei's contemporaries had no choice but to bid farewell to the screen because of their age, but Li Wei became popular again, participating in the filming of films such as "From Slave to General", "Xu Mao and His Daughters", "A Q Zheng biography", "River Without Navigation", "Ju Dou" and so on.
In 1985, Li Wei played the boat boss pan old five in Wu Tianming's "River Without Navigation Markers", and "bubbled" up and down the wooden row with his bare arms all day long. He boldly performed a bare-ass swimming in the river, showing the rich emotional world of the characters, which made the audience look very moved.
Li Wei was nominated for the Golden Rooster Award for Best Actor for his outstanding performance in "The River Without Navigation". The famous Italian director Bertolucci came to China to shoot "The Last Emperor", he had seen many Chinese movies, and asked to find an actor who starred in "Spring in a Small Town" in 1948, and an actor who played Pan Laowu in "River Without Navigation" in 1983.
Bertolucci was very excited to see Li Wei, and he did not expect that the protagonists of these two movies that were more than 30 years apart were the same actor Li Wei. Li Wei played a desolate old flag man in "The Last Emperor", with only two scenes and a few shots, but the performance was very vivid and unforgettable.