The Forbes list of the world’s richest actresses provides a heaven-sent opportunity to slaver over photos of beautiful women and very large sums of money: solemnly recorded figures that can really be no more than intelligent guesswork. In pretty much the same spirit, Forbes regularly provides an enjoyable ranking of the richest fictional people, from Jay Gatsby to Smaug, complete with estimated dollar amounts.
This year, Jennifer Lawrence is top of the actress list, with a supposed pre-tax income of $46m. Melissa McCarthy comes in second with a putative $33m and Scarlett Johansson gets bronze with what could plausibly be $25m.
But wait. This list features actors who many people will never have heard of: No 5 is Fan Bingbing ($17m) and Deepika Padukone ($10m) is No 10. Such is our Hollywood-centric world, these names may be unfamiliar. But the former is a colossal star of the Chinese film industry, while Padukone enjoys a similiar status in India.
Bingbing is a former TV star turned movie icon in mainland China, and she has also – in the now traditional manner – become a multi-hyphenated career player. She is a fashion designer, supermodel, philanthropist and, most importantly, producer-mogul. She set up the Fan Bingbing studio to make her own films and develop other projects. In Hollywood, she has played Blink in X-Men: Days of Future Past and, in the world cinema arena, she has acted in Chen Kaige’s Sacrifice and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chongqing Blues, which played at Cannes in 2010.
Padukone has a similarly impressive multiple-income stream: model, movie star, fragrance endorser, fashion designer. She has also spoken out about women’s rights and mental health issues. Padukone made her breakthrough in the Bollywood melodrama Om Shanti Om in 2007, opposite the lion of Indian cinema, Shah Rukh Khan. A chequered acting career followed, until her much-loved performance as a girl-about-town in the London-set romantic comedy Cocktail in 2012 restored her status.
So did these two female stars only just get rich? Is that why they have zoomed up into the Forbes list? No, both of them have been making serious bucks on their home turf for a long while without Hollywood taking an interest. It is arguably more a matter of acknowledging the existence of other movie industries that can contribute reassuringly photogenic faces and perhaps avoiding any question of a #richactressesaresowhite palaver. And given Forbes’s £10m minimum, perhaps other actors could expect to have been included. Zhao Wei, for example, is a Chinese actor, investor and brand-endorser who is an estimated net-worth billionaire, partly by virtue of her marriage. Could she have not earned enough to warrant inclusion in the list? I wonder. Without access to the accountants’ paperwork, these lists are not an exact science, more an overview: but if the Forbes list is going to extend its purview beyond Hollywood, there might be many more Asian and South Asian names on its list.
• This article was amended on 25 August 2016. Due to a misidentification in the caption information supplied by the picture agency, the original picture purporting to show Fan Bingbing depicted another actor. This has been corrected and the picture substituted.
