Lillian Lim was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 29, 1952, and lived the first ten years of her life in Chinatown. Her first language was Toisan, the farmers' dialect of southern China around Canton. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelors Degree in Pharmacy in 1975, worked for three years and then returned to university to acquire a Doctorate Degree in Dentistry in 1983. After working as a dentist for 27 years she sold her practice and in September of 2010, at the age of 58, enrolled in a one-year fashion design programme. Upon graduation she took a year of mandarin language classes and then flew to Shanghai, China, in November, 2012, to do a one-year fashion design internship with a couture designer who now designs and manufactures for Armani. She returned to Vancouver in October, 2013, to care for her ailing 90-year-old mother and decided to try her hand at her first love, acting. She found an agent through her middle daughter, Megan Hui (an actor with dual Canadian/American citizenship), in May, 2014, and booked a role in three feature films (The Unseen, DARC, and Birth of the Dragon) and a commercial (jet.com) in 2015. She has never looked back.