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Maggie Cheung Wikipedia

image:Maggie Cheung.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung Man-yuk (張曼玉; pinyin: zhāng m?n y?; Cantonese: dzoeng1 maan6 juk9/juk2) (born September 20, 1964) is a Hong Kong film star who has been cast in more than 80 films since the 1980s.

Cheung moved from Hong Kong to England with her family when she was 8 years old. She returned to Hong Kong after finishing secondary school and worked as a model for a clothing store.

She won second place in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant|pageant in 1983 at the age of 19, and was later cast in a number of TV dramas and movies. Her career rocketed after she co-starred in Police Story (movie)|Police Story, as Jackie Chan's girlfriend.

She has won numerous Best Actress awards and is best known around the world for her roles in Police Story (1985), Super Cop (1992), Actress (1992), Chinese Box (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and Hero (movie)|Hero (2003). She won HK's top actress award in 1990.

Throughout the 1990s Cheung increased the depth of her acting skills and chose projects with more care. She began to divide her time between Europe and Hong Kong, and spent increasing time in Paris, becoming fluent in French, her acting given more of an edge, and her intellectual depth increasing. Freed from the constraints of habitually playing an ingenue (stock character)|ingenue, she took more difficult roles, and developed her characters increasingly with greater skill and
sensitivity. Her ability to react with great precision and emotional honesty within a film has led to successes in Europe, particularly at the Cannes film festival, and she began looking for films with better scripts, more chance for her to explore characters, and to take theatrical risks.

The success of director Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love left Cheung and costar Tony Leung as two of Asia's most internationally recognized stars.

In December 1998, Cheung married French film maker Olivier Assayas, who directed her in Irma Vep and encouraged her to reduce her workload to two films a year. The marriage lasted for three years and the couple divorced in 2001.

Local Hong Kong newspapers said in September 2003 that she was dating Guillaume Brochard, the former administrative president of a watch company for whom she has been modelling jewelery in Hong Kong. She is also a spokesperson for the Vuitton companies in China, an important influence on contemporary Chinese fashion. Rumors are that she is working on actor's diaries on her various film projects, in the manner of Liv Ullman, and that these diaries may be published in the near future through a Paris publishing house.

Last Modified:   2005-04-13