China's golden girl

"Actually there are quite a few famous writers in my delegation and they're deep thinkers, so I learn a lot from their speeches," she says.

She has used her position in the CPPCC to call for a privacy law to protect people like her from the increasingly celebrity-obsessed Chinese press. While the media are prevented from writing anything remotely critical about the government, China's celebrities are fair game, as she and Zhang learned to their cost.

They met in 1987, when Zhang plucked the beautiful young student out of the ranks of the Central Drama Academy in Beijing, China's equivalent of Rada, to star in his debut film, Red Sorghum. They went on to make six more films together, until they broke up in 1995 after the director reportedly refused to marry her. Zhang has since been linked with the pretender to the young actress Zhang Ziyi.

Gong admits that the split left scars, although she married Singapore businessman Ooi Wei Ming in 1996. But the late Nineties was a fallow period for her professionally.

"We'd just broken up and my emotional world stopped. I didn't care about my work. I have to be happy to do my best work. If my love life isn't happy, then my work suffers. I think people work to live, they don't live to work. People who live to work make good leaders, but I'm not like that. I'm not an ambitious woman," she says - and it's no stretch to believe her. Although she's often a daunting presence in her films, in person Gong is candid, unaffected and amusing.

Curse of the Golden Flower is her first film with Zhang since their affair ended, but, despite their history, she says collaborating with him again after a decade wasn't difficult.

In the intervening years, she turned to Hollywood where studios were keen to cast her.

"Zhang came to Miami while I was making Miami Vice," she says, "and spent a week there with me talking about the role and how he saw the film. I feel it's much easier to communicate with him now. Plus, I've grown up a bit in the last 10 years. I expressed my opinions to him and he accepted them. It was a very easy and relaxing experience."

It helped that Zhang gave her a big role to play. As the empress, who's slowly being poisoned by Chow Yun-Fat's impassive, despotic emperor, Gong gives a typically powerful, anguished performance. It's the latest in a line of damaged women she's played in recent years.

"It's by accident," says Gong of a sequence that began with her conniving geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha. "This woman is an empress, under one person and above all others. I think anyone leading that life would be crazy. But the fact that she's crazy, lonely and complicated is very appealing to an actress."

Zhang has always put women at the centre of his films. "I think he has a very deep understanding of women - at least in his films. He goes deeper into analysing his female characters than other directors. He doesn't just reveal one side of a woman, but multiple sides. He studies their social background very carefully."

So far, nothing she's done in Hollywood has come close to equalling the movies she made with Zhang and fellow Chinese director Chen Kaige in the early Nineties. Now, however, she recognises that her future is outside China.

"There are more opportunities for me in the West. Every few days, someone will send me a script or talk to me about a new movie. The new Chinese directors work more slowly than Western directors. It takes them longer to set up their movies," she says.

There's a sense that Gong has outgrown the Chinese film industry. But she still lives in Beijing and her English remains basic. It's something she regrets.

"I'm not a big dreamer. It never occurred to me when I was young that I would get the chance to make films in Hollywood. Now, I always tell young Chinese actresses: "Make sure you learn English, it's your ticket to the world."'

Growing up in the city of Jinan in Shandong Province in eastern China, Gong, the youngest of five children of two university lecturers, wanted to be a dancer. It was only when she failed to get into the Beijing Dance Academy that she decided to give acting a try. Then when she auditioned for Zhang Yimou, her fate was sealed.

"I didn't even particularly like movies," recalls Gong. "Maybe that's why I stood out. I wasn't like, 'Oh I have to get this.'"

Now, she's a role model for the Chinese actresses, like Zhang Ziyi (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), who've emerged after her. But Gong Li has no pretensions about her exalted status. "I'm an emotional person, not a rational person, so my emotional life is always the most important thing to me," she says.

She does admit to wanting to play some lighter roles next. "A housewife would be good. I wouldn't even need to practise, because I am a good housewife." There's an unexpected admission from someone who makes such a convincing empress.

Curse of the Golden Flowers opens on 13 April.