Biography: 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.  Mainstream audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Irma Vep, the aforementioned Centre Stage (aka Actress), Chinese Box, In the Mood for Love, Hero, 2046, and most recently, Clean. 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.  Quotes: "No matter where I'm going, I feel like I'm leaving something behind. Every time I get on a plane, I cry. The flight attendants on Cathay Pacific must think I'm mad." [On being an actress] "You experience a lot more pain than normal people, your mum dies, your dad dies, your boyfriend chucks you, you live in the street, and you're really going through these emotions. You're trying to know what it feels like to watch a man die in front of you, as if you've really lived it. Once that division is gone, it gets blurry, you look back at a shoot and think, was I really that sad because in the film my boyfriend didn't like me -- or was it something else, something real?" "When I did my last comedy, I guess that was 10 years ago, I was trying so hard to be funny. Now I want to do another one without trying to be funny. I want to give it one more shot before I decide I'm not a funny person... I keep thinking that if I say it in front of enough journalists, if it's written enough, maybe someone will ask me to do a comedy." [On declining a role in Bryan Singer's X2] "If I start making films like that, they won't be proud. I'd feel like I was cheating. And I don't want half the world, we have 1.3 billion people in China, to know I'm cheating. That matters to me. I have more pride than that." "Words like 'fabulous,' 'wonderful,' 'great,' 'absolutely gorgeous,' they don't exist in Cantonese. It's good, or it's OK. That's it. It's very blunt, Cantonese. I appreciate that there are no fake words, but it's hard to switch channels, sometimes, after I've spent time in France. I'm just learning to use more generous words myself, but you know, 'gorgeous,' I just can't go to that extreme." "It was heaven. We were in Los Angeles. And we could go anywhere. No one had any idea who I was." "Even though we can say the European or North American market is bigger, no, for me, I want Hong Kong to be my main market. They want to own me and I want to own them. It's out of willingness." "I think I started to have thoughts to really want to be serious about my work when I was about twenty five and I just kind of started to look into that direction and moved into it. But it didn't seem as though it was going anywhere because, you know, films without action or comedy are rare to find in Hong Kong, especially if the main character is a woman. But along the way, I've had a few good breaks." "I think it comes from far away inside me, to be strong to survive everything that comes my way. I think, going back to the beginning, feeling like an alien in an English school when I was eight, that set up my pride very early on. I think I'm very defensive, but I'm trying not to be like that any more." "Because I've done so many different roles, I don't want to repeat myself. It's getting harder and harder to find something interesting." "These two men, how they like their women to be is so different. The way Wong [Kar-wai] sees beauty, or women related to beauty, it has to be that sensual, perfect thing, whereas Olivier [Assayas] is more interested in something more internal and modern. But I feel happy to be able to fit into their desires of what they want to see on the screen. That's what interests me in my work, to transform according to different directors." "I thought, 'This is great, I don't have to do anything. I can just be me.' I was quite happy to think that somebody would take me as I am. And also the idea of being anonymous in France kind of appealed to me. In Hong Kong, you have a bunch of people circling you, all working on you at the same time - one's doing your nails, one's fixing your buttons, one's putting on your shoes, or whatever. And yet, after that, they're gone and you're all alone ... When I was on the set of 'Irma Vep,' people had no idea who I was, so they would hang around and chat with me, and let me sit on the floor and eat my lunch without offering me a chair, all of which was kind of a breath of fresh air. I enjoyed being a part of the crew more than being an - an object." "In most of the scenes, Olivier [Assayas] told me, 'Just do anything you want,' so I really didn't think about what I was going to do. That was the reason why I was able to catch this one magic moment, which to this day is one of the biggest in my career: I managed to blush on-screen. It's one thing that even a very good actor can't do easily, to blush. You can act shy, but to really get the red coming up is not easy. But I didn't have the need to think, 'What am I going to do in my next shot?' and as a result, I had this magic moment." "When I originally packed to go [to Hong Kong to shoot 'In the Mood for Love'], I thought it was going to be three months. And then it became six months. And then it went on and on, and ultimately, I was away from Olivier [Assayas] for 15 months. So I wouldn't say it was joyful, but looking back, it was amazing ... now that it's over." "'Clean' was the first real try-out of my 'new way'. With Zhang Yimou and 'Hero,' I was already trying it, but it didn't work with that film. It wasn't what he was looking for. It was a period film, after all. But after I finished reading Olivier's script, I felt that I could try this new way, and so I put away the script and didn't look at it again until we started shooting, one year later. And I really tried not to learn my lines or to figure out anything about who Emily was - I just wanted to react, to Nick [Nolte], to Beatrice [Dalle], to the other actors." "I used to be nervous every time I heard the phrase, 'Roll camera,' because I knew that whatever I did, it would last forever; people would be watching these films for a hundred years. But now, I'm quite relaxed. I just completely let go. I know that if I react properly, it will come. I don't need to think. I don't need to plan." "There's a phrase that's very poetic in Chinese, but I don't know how to translate it in English, "Something like, 'Where there's a will, there's a way.' I remember that when I first got into this business, I had all these thoughts about being a great actress, and one of the people I was working with at the time said, 'You'll never get there, don't dream of it, just do your funny little thing.' And when I heard the news that I'd won my first big award, the only thought that came to my mind was that phrase: Where there's a will, there's a way." | ||||||||||
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