Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung Man-yuk (born 20 September 1964) is a Hong Kong former actress.

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 achieved critical success in the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, before taking a break from acting following her last starring role in 2004.

She rarely makes public appearances except for fashion events and award ceremonies.

Cheung has won numerous accolades at home and abroad for her acting.

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.

Raised in Hong Kong and Britain, she started her career after placing second in 1983's Miss Hong Kong Pageant.

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 and ten years' stay in Paris.

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.

Soon after her debut, Cheung broke into the film industry, starring in comedies.

She caught the attention of Jackie Chan, who cast her in Police Story (1985) as May, his long-suffering girlfriend.

The film was a huge hit and made Cheung a star overnight.

Cheung was slated to star in TVB's "The Legend of the General Who Never Was", but due to the death of Barbara Yung who was in the midst of filming Battlefield, and The Feud That Never Was a.k.a. Kings of Ideas (橋王之王), Yung's remaining scenes were assigned to Cheung, and Cheung's role was given to Sheren Tang.

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), her first of 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, 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.

She has won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress 5 times in the span of 11 years from 1990 to 2001, and holds the record for most wins in that category.

She also holds the record for most wins for the Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress in Taiwan, having won 4 times.

In 1991, she became the first Chinese performer to win a Best Actress Award at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival for her work in Center Stage.

Cheung subsequently proved her versatility with roles in action films.

In the West, she was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin International Film Festival in 1992 and Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

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).

After taking a break in 1994, Cheung returned to film Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep (1996), which helped her break into the international scene.

That same year, she won further acclaim for her work in the romantic film Comrades: Almost a Love Story, in which she played one of a pair of lovers kept apart for ten years by fate and circumstance.

The following year, she made her first English-language film in Wayne Wang's Chinese Box (1997).

Cast as a mysterious young woman named Jean, Cheung held her own alongside the more internationally well-established stars, Jeremy Irons and Gong Li.

The Wong Kar-wai–directed In the Mood for Love (2000), in which she plays a cheongsam-wearing character opposite male lead Tony Leung, is a classic in both the film and fashion worlds.

In 2004, she became the first Asian actress to be nominated for the French César Award for Best Actress.

Her most acclaimed performances include As Tears Go By, Center Stage, Green Snake, Irma Vep, Comrades: Almost a Love Story, The Soong Sisters, Hero and Clean.