Born in Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung traces her ancestry to Shanghai, China. In 1971, she studied Primary One in St Paul's Convent School. Her merchant-class family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was eight. Cheung spent part of her childhood and adolescence in the UK. She returned to Hong Kong in 1982 for vacation, but ended up staying for modeling assignments. Soon she got a salesgirl job at Lane Crawford department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won first runner-up and the Miss Photogenic award. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year.
Prior to 1988, Maggie’s screen appearance was often limited to eye candy roles. One of Cheung's notable film roles then is that of May, the girlfriend of police detective Kevin Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan's Police Story series (however, she did not reprise the role in Police Story 4: First Strike or New Police Story). Maggie frequently cited her performance in the film As Tears Go By (1988), her first of many collaborations with director Wong Kar-Wai, as the piece that truly began her serious acting career. Maggie Cheung is famous for being a talented multi-lingual actress. In Centre Stage (1992), she performed in Cantonese , Mandarin and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean (2004), she performed in fluent English, French and Cantonese. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.
Cheung was the jury member at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival, 1999 Venice Film Festival and 2007 Cannes Film Festival. When, for the first time in its history, the Cannes Film Festival used a photographic image of a real actress on its poster (59th, 2006), that actress was Maggie Cheung.
She married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998 and they divorced in 2001. Their relationship remained amicable, however, as in 2004 Cheung made her award-winning film Clean with him. As part of her portrayal of the drug-addicted aspiring singer Emily Wang in Clean, Maggie Cheung performed songs written by David Roback of Mazzy Star.On 7 February 2007, The New York Times rated Maggie Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role Emily Wang in Clean. After 25 years (more than half her age) of making films, Maggie is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional role, but she would like to compose music and paint, after fulfilling her acting potential. Not very good news for anyone who loves cinema, but the good news is that there's an ocean of Maggie Cheung - more than 80 films - to discover over a lifetime.
| VITAL STATS | | Eye color: Black | | Height: 5' 6¼" (1.68 m) | | Nickname(s): Man-Yuk | | Notable feature(s): Light skin, dark eyes & hair. | | Education: Attended the St. Paul's Convent School for girls in Hong Kong. | | Family: One older sister. | | Resides in: Beijing, China | | Religious affiliations: Unknown | | Political affiliation: Unknown | | Personal interests/hobbies: Music, cinema, art. | | Charities/Causes: Hong Kong Aids Foundation, Audi’s Brand Ambassador in China, UNICEF's project “Driving Dreams,” aiming to bring life-skills and sports activities to more than 30,000 out-of-school children in over 150 poor villages across western China. | | Other: Grew up in Bromley, Kent, when she lived in the UK. | | |
espharlamelaposted 44 days ago
