Mao's Last Dancer

2009

English

7.3

♡ 10

55%

Bruce Beresford Director

Bruce Greenwood as Ben Stevenson

Penne Hackforth-Jones as Cynthia Dodds

Amanda Schull as Elizabeth

Nicholas Hammond as TV Reporter

At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he falls in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.