Background and career
Maggie Cheung (Cheung Man-yuk; Chinese: 張曼玉; pinyin: Zhāng Mànyù; born 20 September 1964) is a Hong Kong actress. She is considered to be one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed actresses in Asia. Cheung is the recipient of numerous accolades, including six Hong Kong Film Awards and five Golden Horse Awards, holding the record for most awards in the Best Actress category. Internationally, she is best known for winning the Silver Bear for Center Stage (1991) and the Cannes Film Festival Award for Clean (2004), making her the first Asian actress to receive the latter and the only Asian actress to have won Best Actress awards at two of the three major European film festivals. Cheung first rose to prominence in the 1980s, gaining wide recognition through her collaboration with Jackie Chan in the Police Story film series. She quickly expanded her work from commercial action and comedy to dramatic roles, appearing in films such as As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1990), Irma Vep and Comrades, Almost a Love Story (both 1996). Her international breakthrough came with Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), which not only gained her worldwide fame but also received widespread acclaim, ranking fifth on Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 list of the top 100 films in film history. The website of Entertainment Weekly in the United States once listed the "51 classic performances overlooked by the Oscars" in the 86-year history of the Oscars, and Cheung's performance in In the Mood for Love became one of the only two Asian performances on the list. Since the late 2000s, Cheung has largely stepped back from acting, making only occasional public appearances at festivals, fashion events, and industry ceremonies. Beyond acting, she has taken on selective creative and philanthropic roles, including serving as a UNICEF ambassador.
Maggie Cheung was born in Hong Kong on 20 September 1964 to Shanghainese parents. She attended St. Paul's Primary Catholic School in Happy Valley, where she began at the primary one level. Her family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was eight. She spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Bromley, London, and attended St Edmund's School, Canterbury. She returned to Hong Kong at the age of 18 in 1982 for a vacation but ended up staying for modelling assignments and other commitments. She also briefly had a sales job at the Lane Crawford department store. In 1983, Cheung entered the Miss Hong Kong pageant and won the first runner-up and the Miss Photogenic award as well. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year. After two years as a TV presenter, it led to a contract with TVB (the television arm of the Shaw Bros. Studio). Cheung is a polyglot as a result of her upbringing in Hong Kong and England, ten years' stay in Paris and five years' stay in Beijing. In Center Stage, Cheung performed in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, French, and Cantonese.
Shortly after her debut, Maggie Cheung broke into the film industry by starring in the comedy Prince Charming (1984), which became a box office hit. Her standout performance caught the attention of Jackie Chan, who subsequently cast her as May—a long-suffering girlfriend—in the 1985 film Police Story. The movie achieved tremendous success, catapulting Cheung to overnight stardom and cementing her popularity across Asia.
Despite her success, Cheung found herself typecast in the roles of comics or weak, clumsy women. Realizing this, Cheung wanted to break away by seeking more dramatic roles. She got this opportunity when Wong Kar-wai cast her in As Tears Go By (1988), the first of her many collaborations with Wong.
Cheung often cites the film as the piece that truly began her serious acting career, and she won critical praise for it. In 1989–1990, she won Best Actress awards at the Golden Horse Award and Hong Kong Film Award for her work in Full Moon in New York and A Fishy Story respectively. Rolling Red Dust won the Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 1992, she became the first Chinese performer to win a Best Actress Award at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival for her work in Center Stage (1991). Cheung made a historic contribution to China in the performance award. With this film, Maggie Cheung won the Best Actress Award at the Taiwan Golden Horse Film Awards, the Best Actress Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and many other awards. Cheung subsequently proved her versatility with roles in action films. Her performance in the sci-fi martial arts smash hit The Heroic Trio (1992) and its sequel, Executioners (1993), impressed both critics and audiences with her martial arts skills. Also in a departure from her usual roles, Cheung played a beautiful and vicious femme fatale in New Dragon Gate Inn (1992). In the film Green Snake (1993), she played a snake demon who transformed into a human form. She was both good and evil, yearning for human emotions while feeling confused about them. In Wong Kar-wai's film Ashes of Time (1994), she almost carried the soul of the character with "static performance": without fierce dramatic conflicts, she conveyed turbulent emotions through eyes, gestures and silence.
After having acted in more than 68 movies, most of which were action films, in less than a decade, she decided to take her career in another direction. She took a two-year sabbatical and used the time to reflect upon which kinds of roles interested her. She began getting interested in art and music, she travelled and perfected her language studies.
