Of all the roles for women in Hollywood were housed in one giant file cabinet, among the folders marked bookish schoolgirl, wide-eyed and wanton temptress, hardened district attorney, lonely soccer mom and rocking-chair-bound granny, there would be one labeled She Kicks Butt. Lucy Liu imagines that this is where you would find her picture.

Lucy Liu, now 34, was born in Queens.

"I bet you my head shot is right there," she said with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Right up front."

In the decade or so she has been in the business, Ms. Liu has fashioned a lucrative career out of playing the icy sex kitten ?first as the emotionally barren Ling Woo on Fox's popular legal series, "Ally McBeal," then as a coldblooded dominatrix in "Payback," a frosty princess in Jackie Chan's "Shanghai Noon," a federal agent in the box office bust "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" and as Alex Munday, the bikini-waxer by day, private investigator by night in the "Charlie's Angels" franchise.

But it is her role as O-Ren Ishii, a kimono-clad femme fatale in Quentin Tarantino's blood-drenched, slice-'em-up "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" (which opened Friday), that has elevated Ms. Liu, 34, to an entirely new level of ruthlessness and secured the actress's position as one of America's leading action heroines, at the risk of being typecast as a dragon lady.

In this estrogen-fueled homage to spaghetti westerns and kung-fu flicks, Ms. Liu plays the archenemy of a character called the Bride (Uma Thurman), a retired hit woman who is brutally attacked on her wedding day and left for dead by a gang of assassins called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS). Four years after surviving a bullet in the head, the Bride awakes from a coma and sets out on a revenge mission.

Her first target, Ms. Liu's O-Ren Ishii, a k a Cottonmouth, is also beset with a stack of issues. At age 7 she witnesses the gruesome murder of her parents. Four years later she avenges their deaths. By age 20, she is one of the top female assassins in the world. Five years later, at a ceremony honoring her rise to the head of the Japanese yakuza underworld, she swiftly decapitates a male capo for denouncing her Japanese/Chinese-American background. With the nemesis's head in hand, O-Ren plunges into a speech about open communication that sounds straight out of a human resources manual.

Lucy Liu as a famed assassin in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," the new film from the director Quentin Tarantino.

"I'm going to speak in English," she calmly states, "just so you know how serious I am."

It is both a comical and a painfully disturbing scene in a film filled with them. Of her diabolical character, Ms. Liu said: "I felt like I really understood her emotionally. In my mind she was a survivor, and it was either kill or be killed."

Much has been made about the copious violence in "Kill Bill." Limbs are amputated. Heads are scalped. Blood flows like Champagne at a Miramax post-Oscar bash. Ms. Liu acknowledged that Mr. Tarantino's latest effort ?the fourth film he has directed, and the first since "Jackie Brown" in 1997 ?wasn't for everyone, but added that those going to a film by the director should know not to expect light, G-rated fare.

"To say that the movie is violent is not taking into consideration what movie you're seeing," said Ms. Liu, interviewed recently at a Midtown hotel. "It's like watching a horror movie and saying the movie's gory. Of course that's the case. It's a horror movie."

To prepare for her role as a samurai sword fighter, Ms. Liu said she spent three months in training and learned some Japanese. Neither of which was easy.

"People just assume I've done martial arts my whole life," said Ms. Liu, who began studying Kali-Eskrima-Silat ?a Philippine form of fighting ?in her early 20's. "I did nothing my whole life. I ate, hung out and played handball."

Born in Jackson Heights, Queens, Ms. Liu, the daughter of working-class Chinese immigrants, recalled many an afternoon spent parked in front of a television set. Though she seldom saw anyone who resembled her on either the small or big screen, Ms. Liu, who attended Stuyvesant High School, said she always dreamed of acting.

"I just felt like there was something otherworldly about being an actress," she said. "When you're younger and you don't feel like you quite fit in anywhere, you think there must be a community of misfits out there that you can fall into."

After a brief stint at New York University, Ms. Liu transferred to the University of Michigan, where she studied Asian languages and culture. (She is fluent in Mandarin.) The actress auditioned for a minor role in the school's production of "Alice in Wonderland" and waltzed away with the lead, a life-changing moment, she said.

"I had allowed myself to believe that I wasn't ever going to be important enough or good enough or right enough, colorwise," Ms. Liu said. "I thought that I had to be Caucasian to ever see the light of day. Earning that role made me realize that in a weird way, I was being racist toward myself. I had been thinking so small."

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