Maggie Cheung

Trivia

• Maggie Cheung got her next big break, and her chance to prove herself as a dramatic actress, when Wong Kar-Wai cast her in his 1988 crime drama As Tears Go By.
• Maggie Cheung continued to do comedies and put-upon-woman roles (starring in the Police Story sequels and appearing in the Chow Yun-Fat action flick A Better Tomorrow 3), she also sought out more challenging work.
• Maggie Cheung earned strong notices for her work in such films as the family conflict drama Song of the Exile (1990) and Wong Kar-Wai's 1991 period drama Days of Being Wild.
• In 1992, Maggie Cheung won some of the greatest acclaim of her career for her work in The Actress, Stanley Kwan's docudrama about a silent film icon.
• In 1992, Maggie Cheung further proved her versatility with starring roles in three more action films, Twin Dragons with Jackie Chan; the third installment of the Police Story trilogy; and The Heroic Trio, in which she and fellow action stars Michelle Yeoh and Anita Mui were cast as comic book superwomen.
• Following another collaboration with Wong on Ashes of Time, a 1994 period drama, Maggie Cheung broke through to an international audience in Irma Vep (1996).
• The popular film, directed by Olivier Assayas (whom Maggie Cheung married in 1998), featured Maggie Cheung as herself, an actress caught up in the chaos surrounding a filmmaker's attempts to make a tribute to Louis Feuillade's classic serial Les Vampires.
• Spending much of the film clad in an extremely flattering cat suit, Maggie Cheung endeared herself to international critics and audiences alike.
• The following year, she made her first English-language film, starring alongside Jeremy Irons and Gong Li in Wayne Wang's Chinese Box.
• Cast as a mysterious young woman named Jean, Maggie Cheung held her own against the more internationally well-established Irons and Gong.

Quotes

• "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 [Karwai]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."
• "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."
• "It was heaven. We were in Los Angeles. And we could go anywhere. No one had any idea who I was."
• "Words like 'fabulous,' 'wonderful,' 'great,' 'absolutely gorgeous,' they don't exist in Cantonese. It's good, or it's O.K. 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."
• "If I was drinking something [in my house], they said, 'Oh, she got dumped, she's so miserable she's turning to drink'. Or if my mother and sister came over, they said, 'She's so miserable she needs her family to support her through this hard time.'"
• "...you experience a lot more pain than normal people, your mom 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?"
• "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."