New York - Former film star Lin Ching-hsia says she has been mulling over making a comeback, after she met her old friends at actress Carina Lau's wedding in July.

In an interview with the Taiwan press in New York last week, she said she was reading five to six screenplays at the moment.

The veteran of 100 movies said she may make her 101st film with the right role and the right team.

'I never said I was retiring,' she was quoted as saying in Apple Daily.

But the role would have to be 'within the scope of my ability', she added.

'If it isn't a good role, if they aren't people I am familiar with, I won't make a comeback.'

Lin, 53, stopped acting after she married fashion tycoon Michael Ying in 1994. The last movie she made was director Wong Kar Wai's martial arts epic Ashes Of Time (1994), which is being released in a restored version this year.

Lin, who was in the United States last week for the premiere of Ashes Of Time Redux, said Wong planted the idea of a comeback in her mind when they were at Lau's wedding in Bhutan.

'The day before Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Carina Lau's wedding, Wong Kar Wai talked to me for an hour,' she said.

'For half an hour, we chatted about Tsui Hark. Later, he told me, 'You're a star. It's a fact you cannot change in a lifetime. One hundred movies are a comma in your life, not a full stop.''

Later, she had such fun with her old friends at the wedding that it brought back memories of her film-making days, she said.

She started thinking that 'if there was an opportunity, it would be fun to do it again'.

Asked about singer-director Jay Chou's proposal that she stars in his next movie, she said she had not seen his script.

But she added she was a fan of his directorial debut, high-school romance Secret (2007), and had seen it twice.

Apple Daily said she had turned down two opportunities to work with director Tsui in 2000 and 2005.

She last spoke of a comeback in Hong Kong in 2006, when she met actor Chow Yun Fat and director Lee Ang at the premiere of the director's Brokeback Mountain and they said they would team up for a film.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Oct 8, 2008.