Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk

Maggie Cheung is a Cannes Best Actress, Berlin Best Actress, five-time Hong Kong Film Award and five-time Taiwan Golden Horse winning Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England, she has over 70 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983. She is the first Asian actress to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. 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 Lane Crawford department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won first runner-up and 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 “May”, the girlfriend of police detective “Kevin” Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan’s Police Story series. 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 Cantonese , Mandarin and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, French and Cantonese. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.