Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung (born September 20, 1964) is a multi award-winning Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England, she has over 80 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983.

Biography

Born in Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung traces her ancestry to Shanghai, China. Her merchant-class family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was a child. 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 a Japanese department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won second place and also bagged 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 movie roles then is that of "Mei", the girlfriend of police detective "Kevin" Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan's Police Story movies (however, she did not reprise the role in Police Story 4: First Strike or New Police Story). Maggie frequently cited her performance in the movie As Tears Go By (1988), her first of many collaborations with film director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛, as the piece that truly began her serious acting career. Maggie Cheung is famous for being a talented multi-lingual actress. In Centre Stage, she performed in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, Parisian French, Cantonese and a smattering of Mandarin. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.

Audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Centre Stage (as Ruan Lingyu), In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, 2046, Hero, and, most recently, Clean.

She married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998 but divorced him in 2001. Their relationship remained amicable, however, as in 2004 Cheung made her award-winning movie 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 in Clean. After 25 years of making movies, Cheung is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional comedic role, but she would like to paint and compose music, after fulfilling her acting potential.

Awards

Hong Kong Film Awards
Best Actress
1989 A Fishy Story
1992 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
1998 The Soong Sisters
2001 In the Mood for Love

Golden Bauhinia Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Golden Horse Awards
Best Actress
1989 Full Moon in New York
1990 Red Dust
1991 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
2000 In the Mood for Love

Other Awards

Berlin International Film Festival
Best Actress
1992 Centre Stage

Cannes Film Festival
Best Actress
2004 Clean

Hawaii International Film Festival
Award for Achievement in Acting