Once a famous ballet dancer, Thanh Mai has broadened her career into acting, emceeing, and managing the make-up training school BB Thien Nga in Ho Chi Minh City.

The well spoken Son La beauty, whose parents worked in the civil service, spent 10 years studying ballet dancing from age seven.

Those years taught her self-discipline, new skills and resilience, she says. For learning ballet, the government gave her special rations of rice, sugar and milk that she shared with her family.

Mai became a well known ballet dancer by 16, and was chosen to perform in Vietnam and overseas. She was fascinated by the make-up women wore in France, Poland and Russia and got the idea of opening a make-up business. At that time, she danced, modeled and acted in films such as Co thu mon toi nghiep (Poor goalkeeper), Giot mua bien mat (Raindrops disappear) and Bay tinh (Love trap). She asked her father to invest her pay in gold so that she could save for her business.

The arts provided the money to buy her first business, she said.

Mai opened her own hairdressing salon at age 20, then launched the make-up training school BB Thien Nga in 1998. Instead of turning her name into a trademark, she named her school Thien Nga (Swan) after the famous ballet.

She knew her days as a professional dancer would not last forever so she studied at a foreign university and earned a master of business administration from the University of Washington coordinating with the National Economics University.

She also attended a refresher course of aesthetics in France to upgrade her make-up school. At that time, she worked for Scavi, France’s big garment group and she became their business representative in Vietnam.

The success of her BB Thien Nga School was because it was one of the first to introduce high-quality makeup training in Vietnam when the economy started to come back to life. She also tailored the courses to the demands of women. It was a small market, which multinational companies ignored largely leaving it for locals. A lot of what she did was accidental but she learnt later studying business administration that she had made the right moves.

Mai now entrusts the management of her BB Thien Nga to her staff. She devotes her energy to emceeing the talkshow Suc song moi (New vitality) on Vietnamese Television’s VTV1 channel. She has to be at the film studio at 6 a.m. five days a week and is hoping for another opportunity to act in films.

VietNamNet/TN