Maggie Q, born Margaret Denise Quigley (stage name: Chinese: 李美琪; pinyin: Lǐ Měiqí, Vietnamese: Lý Mỹ Kỳ (Lei Mei-Kei); born May 22, 1979), is an American actress and former fashion model. She initially gained fame in Hong Kong.
Maggie Q was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to an American father of Polish, French Canadian and Irish descent, and a Vietnamese mother and is therefore Eurasian. Her parents met while her father was stationed in Vietnam. Maggie is the youngest of five children. She has two sisters and two half-siblings from her mother's previous marriage in Vietnam. After graduating from Mililani High School she traveled 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.
She began acting 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. She has, however, stated that she took Mandarin and Cantonese lessons during her career in Asia and is able to speak both languages in varying degrees. Among her first appearances in film was 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.
She starred alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III. She played Zhen, the only female member of his IMF team. Maggie played Mai Linh, one of the computer-hacking extortionists in the 2007 Bruce Willis movie Live Free Or Die Hard, the fourth film in the Die Hard franchise. On August 29, 2007, Balls of Fury opened nationwide in the U.S., where Maggie portrayed the niece of table tennis guru Master Wong (James Hong).
