The act had become very tired, very quickly, Chen explains. But what turned things around was her family - meeting her husband, cardiologist Peter Hui and, later, the arrival of daughters Angela (in 1998) and Audrey (2001). These days, Chen divides her time between running their home in San Francisco and nurturing a creative career that has continued to blossom during the past decade.

"At this stage of my life, my family is everything. I am able to travel and explore because I have a very stable home," says the 51-year-old. "Filmmaking is just my vacation away from cooking and cleaning, and playing with my kids. From being a wife and mother. My life is pretty secure and stable. I love my boring little life. So this acting is like it's the middle of the night and I put my mask on and go out and be someone else."

The reason the conversation has turned to such matters is the role that Chen has been working on during the past year. We are meeting in Singapore as the HBO network begins the publicity push for its first co-production with Australia's ABC TV. is a 10-part series set in the Singapore of the 1960s, with Chen starring as a woman forced to take over a detective agency after the murder of her husband. The series is set for screening across the region in the third quarter of the year.

Chen says while she became interested in the project after reading the script, she had some reservations about her character as first presented on the page.

"When I first read the script, I thought she wasn't that much [of a character], but I was able to bring a lot of my own feelings into her. She is now flesh and blood," says Chen. "What I have, she doesn't have. Her husband died and the most precious things in my life are my children and she is unable to conceive.

"This gives her an underlying sense of unworthiness and a sense of longing. In a way we are like two sides of the same coin. What I deem so dear she has either lost or never had. That's how I relate to her."

Moving back into television - it has been 22 years since Chen was part of maverick American director David Lynch's global smash - has given her the opportunity to fully flesh out a character, Chen says. "Personally, I am more a film person. I go to the cinema more than I sit at home and watch TV. But playing a part in either is much the same. In this particular series I had the time to develop my character. She evolves episode by episode, so that is a luxury that TV gives you."

Chen says she has been able to bring to the role the added confidence of someone with more than three decades of experience in making film, as well as the lessons that her own quite extraordinary personal experiences have brought her over the years.

It was as a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Shanghai that Chen was famously spotted by Jiang Qing - Madam Mao, no less - and cast as the lead in the Chinese box office hit ( ). Overnight, Chen became the most famous actress in the country.

"The fame was a nuisance," says Chen. "It didn't really bring me anything else other than crowds and crowds. In those days I had to ride a bus which was already crowded, but people would crowd me even more. I never thought that when I played Xiao Hua that the whole country would fall in love with her.

"I didn't know how to perform so that was just me as my innocent self. People felt great affection for that and I became 'Little Flower'. I'm 51 and people still see me as 'Little Flower'. It's really not a person anymore - it's a cultural symbol."

To escape from the limelight, as much as she could, Chen focused on her studies. Because she had majored in English, she was able to leave China - at age 21 - first to New York and then to California. "It was a great freedom to me to be able to just go to a supermarket and not to be noticed," she says.

"But I didn't have a real comprehension of what that move really meant, at that time. I simply wanted to see America because I had majored in English. I wanted to see the country where Elvis Presley came from. But I think that I always had a longing for the far away, for what to me was exotic."

Chen didn't stay unnoticed for long though, and the story has it that producer Dino De Laurentiis spotted her walking through a studio car park before asking her to audition for the China-set tale of high-business intrigue, (1986). The role proved a mixed blessing, helping lead to a part in the Bernardo Bertolucci-directed Oscar winner (1987), but also raising eyebrows with a fan base back home still wondering why she had left their country. "When I left it was deemed as a betrayal because I had left all this adoration behind," says Chen.

"It happened again in because I played a mistress and she seemed to like being a mistress. I understand that antagonism now because people love you. It was a lonely time. But looking back I know where it came from now."

Another factor that helped to sustain and expand Chen's career was an invitation in 1996 to take up a spot on the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival. She says the experience of watching a range of different films over a short period convinced her that she had stories of her own to tell.

On the flight back home to the US, she adapted her close friend Yan Geling's novel into a screenplay and then directed its film adaptation, (1998), which won her a Golden Horse award for best director.

Last year saw Chen behind the camera again - with her short film - and she is now working on a story she hopes to bring to the big screen, and to shoot in her homeland.

"In China, I think the themes that you can discuss are somewhat sensitive - censorship is censorship - but the film market is maturing, so there have to be opportunities there and that's what I want to do," says Chen. "I want to work in China, I want to direct again in China and hopefully look at contemporary stories.

"I pay a price - leaving my kids and my husband behind - so it has to be a story I really want to tell, not just a story I think the audience might like. Hopefully, that will come as a by-product."

The timing could not be better for her return to the region. Asia's growing box-office power - and the world's general interest in the region - mean there has never been more focus on what is happening here.

"I think people do want to understand Asia more than ever before," she says.

"And it's always much better when people want to know you, instead of putting you in a situation because they need some spice to fill the dish. Now we are the main dish. Not just the spice."