Barbie Hsu, Taiwanese Actress and Star of ‘Meteor Garden,' Dies at 48

New York Times

14-02-2025

Barbie Hsu, a Taiwanese actress, television host and pop star who catapulted to Pan-Asian popularity in 2001 as the star of the Cinderella-style teenage drama 'Meteor Garden,' died on Feb. 2 in Tokyo. She was 48.
Her death was announced to TVBS News in Taiwan by her sister Dee Hsu, who said the cause was complications of the flu. The family had been vacationing in Japan.
In 'Meteor Garden,' an adaptation of the Japanese manga 'Boys Over Flowers,' Ms. Hsu played Dong Shan Cai, a naïve yet headstrong student from a poor family who is terrorized by a group of four handsome boys who call themselves F4 after she enrolls in the elite private school they attend. She reluctantly enters high society when F4's leader, Dao Ming Si (played by Jerry Yan), falls for her.
With her expressive eyes and elfin features, Ms. Hsu was a natural for the role, and she exploded in popularity across swaths of Asia, where she was known by the nickname Big S.
Fans were particularly drawn to her character's relatable and resilient nature. 'I am like a blade of grass,' she said in one episode. 'No matter how many times you cut me down, I will grow back and live again.'
The four male stars used the series' influence to promote their boy band, also called F4 — for 'Flower Four' — making 'Meteor Garden' an early example of the genre known as idol drama, formulaic but addictive love stories featuring pop stars. Ms. Hsu's character became the genre's classic protagonist.
As Mei Ting Li, a professor of media studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who specializes in fandom and popular culture, wrote in an email, the show 'became the archetype of Chinese-language TV drama that allowed the cross-media celebrity business.'
The series' popularity led to later shows adapted from the same source material, including a 2018 Chinese drama of the same name and the hugely successful 'Boys Over Flowers' (2009).
Its popularity spread as far as the Philippines, where it became one of the country's highest-rated shows, inspiring a quasi-religious fervor among young people that became known as 'Meteor fever.' Filipino men adopted the floppy hair and dress of their favorite characters, and the stars were mobbed when they visited the country.
During one visit, in 2003, the media conglomerate ABS-CBN, which aired 'Meteor Garden,' used decoy actors in wigs to distract the paparazzi, and some 100 policemen were deployed to manage unruly crowds.
Hsi-yuan Hsu was born on Oct. 6, 1976, in Taipei, Taiwan, to Huang Chun-Mei and Hsu Chien. The household was tumultuous: Her mother separated from her father over his gambling. Barbie's mother supported her and her two sisters by working as a real estate broker.
In 1994, Ms. Hsu and her younger sister, Dee, enrolled in the Hwa Kang Arts School in Taipei, where they befriended a group of classmates nicknamed the Seven Fairies, including the actresses and singers Mavis Fan, Pace Wu and Aya Liu.
While at Hwa Kang, the Hsu sisters began performing as a pop duo known as S.O.S., or Sisters of Shu; their 1995 bubblegum pop song 'Ten Minutes of Love' became a breakout hit. They later changed their name to A.S.O.S., for All Sisters of Shu, and co-hosted variety shows like 'Guess,' from 1996 to 2000, and '100% Entertainment,' from 1998 to 2005.
Ms. Hsu leveraged her 'Meteor Garden' fame to promote two best-selling beauty guides, published in 2004 and 2007, that encouraged readers to try red wine facials to prevent aging and Rogaine to thicken their eyebrows.
In 2008, she branched out into Chinese-language cinema by playing a woman kidnapped by a gang of Interpol agents in 'Connected,' a remake of the 2004 Hollywood thriller 'Cellular.' In 2010, she played a sadistic young woman who murdered her fiancé and his parents on her wedding night in the martial arts film 'Reign of Assassins,' starring Michelle Yeoh.
Ms. Hsu withdrew from acting in 2011, but her tumultuous relationship with the Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei, whom she married in 2010, kept her in the spotlight; they divorced in 2021. Her survivors include a son, Hsi-Lin, and a daughter, Hsi-Yueh, as well as her second husband, Koo Jun-yup, a South Korean singer known as DJ Koo, whom she married in 2022.
Ms. Hsu experienced a host of health issues, including heart disease and epilepsy, as well as a near-fatal seizure during the birth of her son. Her death sent ripples of grief across Asia and trended on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. The South China Morning Post reported that many of her bereaved fans turned to the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek to construct farewell letters mimicking her writing style.
Many of these letters noted her signature phrase: 'Live beautifully.'