Gender: Female Religion:Atheist[1] Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Actor
Nationality: United States Executive summary:Mighty Aphrodite
As a young girl, Mira Sorvino read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, and became fascinated with China. She started hanging out in Chinatown, and soon picked up the Mandarin language from Chinese-American girlfriends. She was a straight-A student in high school, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in East Asian Studies. Her thesis was on the Nanjing Anti-African protests. She now speaks Mandarin fluently, and though Chow Yun-Fat's native language is Cantonese, they were able to chat at length in Mandarin on the set of The Replacement Killers.
Her father, noted character actor Paul Sorvino, discouraged Mira from entering acting. She worked as a waitress and gave Mandarin lessons for several years, while auditioning for stage, TV, and movie parts, and usually being rejected. She briefly appeared on the soap opera Guiding Light and had small roles in several minor movies, until 1995 when she played a hooker and porn star in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, and won an Oscar. Since then, though, with only the rarest exceptions, she has appeared in artsy films, eschewing offers of potential big-budget blockbusters. Her more memorable films include Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, John Woo's The Replacement Killers, and Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. She also battled killer cockroaches in Mimic.
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