Kelly Hu

We catch up with X2 star Kelly Hu on her 35th birthday as she gets ready for the opera.

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If you were to try to guess how Hawaii-born Kelly Hu (pronounced "who") wanted to spend her 35th birthday, you might easily figure out the daytime part of it. She starts out with an early lunch at her Beverly Hills restaurant Basic Bites, with her friend and publicist, Cheryl McLean. "When I'm not working, I'm here three or four times a week," she says. Then she heads to the USA Martial Arts Center in Beverly Hills for a karate class with instructor Morteza Alborzi. She's been practicing karate for eight years--an old roommate introduced her to it--and has a black belt. This skill was of little use to her back when she starred on the soap "Sunset Beach," but useful in stints on "Nash Bridges" and "Martial Law," and absolutely necessary for the film career that took off when she played a siren sorceress in The Scorpion King, which had her wrestling with CGI snakes. Now kicking ass has become a habit, with Cradle 2 the Grave opposite Jet Li and this summer's X2, in which she plays Wolverine's nemesis Lady Deathstrike.

It's Hu's choice of evening celebration that's the real surprise--she's going to the opera with her boyfriend, Luca Giorgetti, to see Rossini's The Barber of Seville. This is not what stars in Hollywood tend to do on special nights, even those without black belts. Hu gets properly done up for the occasion at Chris McMillan for Art Mix in Beverly Hills, where Jonathan Hanousek gives her an updo and makeup artist Elaine Offers struggles to improve the beauty that won Hu the Miss Teen USA crown in 1985. Back at her house Hu slips into a Gai Mattiolo dress and Cesare Paciotti shoes, grabs a Swarovski purse and is off to the Los Angeles Music Center.

Her birthday night at the opera will put her in close proximity to a kind of jeopardy she would never personally expose herself to, not even in her Lady Deathstrike alter ego: "I'm horribly afraid of performing live--I'd rather jump off buildings," she says.

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Enid Portuguez