Actress sad over cleavage cuts in hit TV drama(2)

Chau Hoi Mei plays the female lead in the new TV drama, Exceedingly High Road. She stars in the popular TV series, The Empress of China. Photos provided to China Daily

At the peak of her career, Chau was a hot TV star to millions of fans across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Today, she has begun to enjoy a more relaxed pace of life in Beijing, working on an average of two to three productions a year, according to her agent Zhang Wenyu.

Beijing has been her home for more than a decade. And it wasn't the lure of money that drew her to the Chinese capital, she says.

"I shot dramas on the mainland as early as 1998, when the renminbi was worth less than the Hong Kong dollar. So it's not the money that made me want to settle down in Beijing," she says.

"I love Beijing. It's a city with four clearly changing seasons. Hong Kong has only one season."

Her fondness for the city overrides the discomfort she faces with smog, she adds.

"Beijing is actually much better now than the time when I first made it here. I still remember seeing donkey－or horse-drawn transport in the streets. As a lot of coal was burned for heating, the sky always seemed gray at the time. It's much better now," Chau says.

Viewers can see her in the new TV drama, Exceedingly High Road, which premiered on Beijing Satellite TV on Jan 23. She plays a winery manager, who fights to avenge the death of her beloved twin sister.

Still hailed as "a goddess" by her followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Chau is among the rare breed of showbiz celebrities to appear in public without makeup.

A series of Chau's selfies on her personal microblog that go with a self-spoofing caption, "Can that be a goddess?" attracted more than 1,000 comments and some 5,100 "thumbs-up" clicks on last count.

At a recent news conference, when she was asked about her beauty secret, she said: "Aging is a natural process. No one can avoid it. I don't pay that much attention. Actually, before coming to the conference, I even ate fried chips."