made a failed attempt to defend her own entertainment company from a lawsuit in a Shanghai courtroom last week, the official Shanghai Star reorted Tuesday. The Number One Intermediate Court on Friday ordered Chen's Shanghai JC Hightec Entertainment Co. Ltd. -- the main target of the suit -- to pay a Suzhou city merchant 546,675 yuan (65,864 dollars) in compensation, the report said.
Ying Jiuqing, the plaintiff, had sought more than 12 times that figure and accused the company of fraud but the court rejected the latter charge.
A year before opening an amusement centre here in October 1997, JC Hightec sold hundreds of thousands of commemorative magnetic card tickets that would be good for amusements.
It sold the tickets for 50 yuan with the advertised promise that they would be usable at the centre at double that value after opening.
But the centre ultimately only honoured them as being worth 65 yuan and unilaterally declared them expired on January 1 this year. It also did not award trips to the United States' Disneyland or Hong Kong's Ocean Park to lucky card purchasers as advertised.
Ying sued because he had bought a whopping 190,000 of the cards as an investment and to use as gifts.
The report said the actress's firm had "allegedly gone into liquidation." JC Hightec's liability was limited by the fact that it had to close the centre for reasons beyond its control, the court ruled.
The report did not detail Chen's activity in the court proceedings, saying only that she served as her company's "legal representative."
The Shanghai native, 39, burst onto the international film scene with her role as the opium-addict wife of the emperor Puyi in The Last Emperor.
She also played a sexy sawmill proprietress in David Lynch's cult US television series Twin Peaks.
Chen recently gained international acclaim for her work behind the camera directing The Sent-Down Girl, the tale of a young Chinese woman sent to Tibet during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
She now lives mainly in the United States.
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