Hong Kong Beautiful Actress: Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk
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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. Audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Irma Vep, Centre Stage (aka Actress), Chinese Box, In the Mood for Love, Hero, 2046, and most recently, Clean. Maggie Cheung was the jury member at 1997 Berlin Film Festival, 1999 Venice Film Festival and 2007 Cannes Film Festival. When, for the first time in its history, the Cannes Film Festival used a photographic image of a real actress on its poster (59th, 2006), that actress was Maggie Cheung. On 7 February 2007, The New York Times rated Maggie Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role Emily in Clean. After 25 years of making movies, Cheung is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional comedic role, but she would like to compose music and paint, after fulfilling her acting potential.
Profile
Name: Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk 張曼玉
Profession: Actress
Date of birth: 1964 September 20
Horoscope: Libra
Place of birth: Hong Kong
Height: 168cm
Weight: 51kg
Blood type: O
