Lucy Sheen

Sheen was born Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen in Kowloon, British Hong Kong. She was abandoned as a baby, and was one of 106 transracially adopted children from the 1950s until 1963 through the Hong Kong Project.^[1][2] Sheen arrived in the UK in 1963; her ethnicity was not talked about in her family, and she later expressed feelings of rejection from both white and East Asian communities.^[3] She graduated from Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in 1984,^[4] being the first Chinese British actress to graduate from drama school.^[5]

Sheen's first professional acting credit was in a leading role in Ping Pong (1986).^[6][7] The film was one of the first Chinese British films, and the first to be filmed on location in London's Chinatown.^[8] She works as a professional actor, appearing on stage, and on TV shows such as Casualty, Call the Midwife, and Eastenders.^[9][10]

Sheen has been outspoken about her cultural identity and stereotyping of East Asians in the arts. She wrote a feature in the 2018 book Foreign Goods: A Selection of Writings by British East Asian Artists, edited by Jingan Young.^[11] She was one of the founding members of BEATS (British East Asians working in Theatre and Screen) along with Jennifer Lim and Daniel York Loh, a group dedicated to the advancement of representation for British Asian actors. To encompass different heritages and cultures, the group embraced a pan-Asian identity.^[12] The organisation was originally formed under the name British East Asian Artists (BEAA) in the wake of a casting controversy in 2012–2013 by the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Orphan of Zhao.^[13][10] In 2019 the group objected to the lack of East Asian writers on the children's sitcom Living with the Lams, with Sheen joining over 100 other industry professionals in signing a letter to the BBC protesting the conditions of the show's production.^[14][15] For the term 2025–2027, she was elected to the Equity trade union's Race and Equality Committee.^[16]

In 2020, Sheen wrote the titular drama in an online theatre project entitled WeRNotVirus, a series directed Jennifer Tang and Anthony Lau in response to the rise in racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. A review in The Guardian gave the whole project three stars out of five, referring to Sheen's piece as the "most rousing" of the short plays.^[17]