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

Michael Galasso

Michael Galasso

Composer, violinist and musical director Michael Galasso was born in Hammond, Louisiana in 1949, to a concert violinist father and an oboist mother. He began studying the violin at the age of 3 and had his solo debut performing Vivaldi’s Concerto in A minor with the New Orleans Philharmonic at age 11. Galasso continued his studies at Oberlin and Dartmouth Colleges.

A musician of classical formation influenced by his encounter with John Cage at the age of 18, born in the land of jazz, rock and rhythm n’blues, author for theater, cinema, dance and sound installations, this violin virtuoso has been experimenting for 30 years on a melodical and rhythmical synthesis in which his affinities with Baroque music are entwined with his American heritage as well as with Iranian and central Asia traditions.

Michael Galasso began his career composing music for Robert Wilson's "Ouverture"(1972), "The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin" (1973), "A Letter for Queen Victoria" (1974-5), and "The $ Value of Man" (1975). Also with Wilson, he has written the score for Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea" (1998), Strindberg's "A Dreamplay" (1998), voted the best foreign theater production for the 1999-2000 season by the French Theater and Music Critics Society after a performance in Paris in March 2000 at the Theatre National de Chaillot, Chekhov’s "Three Sisters" (2001), and for the theatrical version of Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz and Robert Wiene's silent film, "The Cabinet of Doktor Caligari" (2002). In 2004, Wilson and Galasso collaborated on “Les Fables de La Fontaine” for the Comédie-Française, which premiered January 30, 2004 in Paris and has been an enormous critical and public success. In November 2004, Galasso and Wilson will premiere “2 Lips and Dancers in Space” with the Nederlands Dans Theater in Luxembourg. Galasso is presently finishing the score for “Peer Gynt”, directed by Wilson and premiering in Oslo in February 2005.

Recent film scores include Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chunking Express” and “In the Mood for Love”, Babak Payami’s Iranian film “Secret Ballot”, Tajikistan’s Djemsjed Osmonov’s “Angel on my Right Shoulder”, Sam Gabarski’s “The Tango Rashevski”, Darvish Zaim’s Turkish film, “Çamur” (Mud), and Mariana Otero’s documentary “Histoire d’un Secret” and Gabriele Salvatores’ “I am not afraid”.

Galasso also has made numerous sound/music installations, including the Giorgio Armani Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000 (the first sound installation in the New York Guggenheim's history) and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2001. Subsequently the exhibition has traveled to the Neue National Galerie in Berlin in May 2003, followed by London’s Royal Academy of Arts in October 2003 and Rome at the Terme Diocleziano in May 2004. Other installations include the Swiss EXPO 2002, and the Basilique de Saint-Denis in Paris. Michael Galasso has also written and performed music for choreographers Karole Armitage, Andy DeGroat and Lucinda Childs.

Michael Galasso’s second album for ECM Records, “High Lines”, was released in March 2005.

2046 (2004)

2046 IMDb (7,5 out of 10)

2046 Official Ocean Films

2046, MonkeyPeaches


2046 is a Hong Kong movie (filmed in Shanghai) written and directed by Wong Kar-wai and released in 2004. It is a loose sequel to Days of Being Wild (released in 1991) and In the Mood for Love (released in 2000). It follows the aftermath of Chow Mo-wan's unconsummated affair with Su Li-Zhen in 1960s Hong Kong but also includes some science fiction elements.

An atmospheric romance about dark-edged romance--sometimes skin deep; sometimes throbbing with physical and visual sensation.

The camera achieves striking beauty... Each smile, each tear, each lit cigarette achieves a sort of luminescent stature unmatched by even Wong’s previous films.

Another achingly evocative and melancholy near-masterpiece from Wong Kar-Wai...blessed with vivid, visceral performances that burst at the seams with reserved passion.