Lucy Liu is known for her bitchy role in Ally McBeal and kick-ass characters in Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels, but when you meet her in person, you find a gentle and kind lady, endowed with angelic beauty and insightful wisdom.

The 44-year-old actress is currently shooting the second season of the TV show Elementary, in which she plays legendary detective Sherlock Holmes’s side kick, Dr. Watson. Unlike other actors, Liu didn’t disport herself to an exotic holiday during the shooting break between the first and second seasons of her show, but instead she flew to Lebanon on a UNICEF mission to help Syrian refugees, who had escaped the raging civil war in their homeland.

“The chemical warfare that occurred in Syria and killed so many people is basically to me the equivalent to what happened at the Holocaust,” she exclaims. “But UNICEF focuses not on the politics aspect but on the children, how can we help them?”

Liu is deeply concerned that without family support, access to schools and basic needs like nutrition and food, this generation of children will be lost.  “It’s a very dire situation and unfortunately people around the world have not acted on it because they don’t want to get involved, but if they don’t get involved then it’s going to just create much more tension even in Lebanon,” she enthuses.

Syrian children, she says, are taking the scarce jobs from Lebanese because they are willing to work of less money, upsetting the social balance in the host country and creating tension with its population.

The American-Chinese star joined UNICEF in 2004, because she wanted to work with children on a global level. Since then, she has travelled the world, helping children in different countries in Asia and Africa. “Basically, I’ve seen and understood the dynamic of what children need in these different countries, and sometimes it’s as simple as water, and if you have water, they can get education, nutrition, and they can have gardens and have an industry of selling their own vegetables,” she says.

Liu doesn’t have her own children, simply because she  didn’t find the right partner to do so, but she is considering having one on her own, but she didn’t elaborate how?