Maggie Q

Maggie Q

Maggie Q, born Margaret Denise Quigley (born May 22, 1979), is an American actress and former fashion model. She initially gained fame in Hong Kong.

Q was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to an American father of French, Polish and Irish descent, and a Vietnamese mother. Her parents met while her father was stationed in Vietnam. Maggie is the youngest of 5 children. She has two sisters and two half-siblings from her mother's previous marriage in Vietnam. She still visits Hawaii with her family. After graduating from Mililani High School she travelled to Japan and Hong Kong to earn money as a fashion model. In 1998 she got her first role in a Chinese-language TV series, and she has been acting ever since.

While still relatively unfamiliar to audiences in the United States, she has achieved celebrity status in Hong Kong and elsewhere in East Asia. Because of her non-Chinese heritage, many of her Asian film appearances are in English or dubbed in the Chinese language. Her big breakthroughs into the film world came when she bagged the lead roles in the Hong Kong action thrillers Gen-Y Cops and Naked Weapon, in which she played the sexy but vulnerable martial artist assassin Charlene Ching. She has also played the titular role of Harmony in the German-Singapore telemovie collaboration Das Haus Der Harmonie, opposite leading Singaporean actress Fann Wong.

Recently, she starred in her biggest Hollywood role to date alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III. She played Zhen, the only female member of his elite IMF team. Maggie plays one of the computer-hacking extortionists in the 2007 Bruce Willis action thriller, Live Free Or Die Hard, the fourth film in the popular Die Hard franchise. On August 29, 2007, Balls of Fury opened nationwide in the U.S. starring Maggie as the ping pong paddle-wielding niece of table tennis guru Master Wong (James Hong, who I'm beginning to think is an immortal.)