She’s Not Just a Pretty Face

Maggie Cheung has tried her hand--or should that be feet?--at on-screen martial arts. But the Hong Kong actress has never quite developed the proficiency for round-house kicks and temple chops that has made her industry colleague, Michelle Yeoh, into an international star.

“I tried to do kung fu, but I’m not very good,” Cheung says, almost apologizing.

To make her reputation, she has had to rely instead on a commodity much rarer in the Hong Kong movie-making world: acting agility and an on-cue emotional breadth that spans a spectrum wider than pouting, whining and looking sexy--though she’s certainly been there too.

In “Super Cop: Police Story III,” she plays Jackie Chan’s beleaguered girlfriend, who basically screams until she’s rescued. In “Heroic Trio” she’s a vampish biker chick who wears little more than a leather bustier and hot pants.

But Cheung is better known for having starred in some of contemporary Hong Kong cinema’s most memorable offerings. She is luminous as the legendary 1930s Shanghai film star Ryan Ling Yu in Stanley Kwan’s “The Actress” (1991). In Wong Kar-Wai’s “Days of Being Wild” (1991), she takes petulance to new heights as a diner waitress jilted by a small-time gigolo.

In an industry populated by former beauty pageant winners (Cheung is one herself), she is considered to be Hong Kong’s answer to Meryl Streep. She has won the Hong Kong Film Awards’ best actress honors twice. Western film critics, too, tend to gush: Vogue’s John Powers calls Cheung “one of the world’s most charismatic screen stars.”

She’s certainly had plenty of roles on which to practice her craft. During her 14-year screen career, Cheung, 33, has made more than 70 feature films. She took a self-imposed two-year hiatus through 1994 and most of 1995. When that is factored in, Cheung’s movie-making average works out to be one film every eight weeks, a breakneck pace remarkable even in Hong Kong’s prolific industry.

Last year, Cheung made her foreign film debut in French director Olivier Assayas’ farce “Irma Vep.” The two met at the Venice Film Festival in 1994. Assayas was struck by her--enough to write “Irma Vep” expressly for Cheung.

In it, she plays a famous Asian actress named (surprise) Maggie Cheung, who is invited by an aging New Wave French director to star in a remake of a cult vampire movie. As Irma Vep, Cheung prowls a moonlit Paris, sheathed in a skin-tight black latex cat costume. The film played art-house cinemas throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia and introduced Cheung to an audience beyond Hong Kong movie fans.

It was this level of fan devotion, coupled with Cheung’s industry reputation, that prompted director Wayne Wang (“The Joy Luck Club,” “Smoke”) to cast Cheung in his new film, “Chinese Box.” The movie, which opens Friday, marks her first role in an American film.

Wang says he first saw Cheung on screen “playing Jackie Chan’s girlfriend or something. She’s always been a really interesting actress. And she had a certain gutsiness in approaching this role that I really liked.”

“Chinese Box,” which also stars Jeremy Irons and China’s most established actress, Gong Li, is Wang’s exploration of Hong Kong, his birthplace, on the eve of its return from British to Chinese rule. Irons plays John, a dying British journalist (note the not-so-subtle symbolism here) in love with Li’s character, a mainland bar hostess. While making a videotape of the final days of the empire, John comes across Jean (played by Cheung), a young local girl who has disfigured her face over a failed love affair with a British schoolboy. Or so she says.

“My character was meant to be an ultra-big liar,’ says Cheung, who speaks in an accent with both cockney English and Hong Kong Chinese inflections. “I wanted to play a role like this. It was an interesting part, not a stereotypical Chinese role. John’s relationship with Jean is like the average foreigner’s experience of Hong Kong itself: He can never be sure how much of what she tells him is truth, hype or absolute scam.”

“Chinese Box” was shot on location in Hong Kong in the months leading up to the hand-over in July 1997. Wang rewrote the script daily, incorporating what was actually happening during the last days of the colony.

“Wayne wanted a lot of improvisation,” says Cheung. “So I told him, ‘why don’t you just not show me the script? Let’s just see what happens every day.’ He thought it was a great idea.”

It was a strategy that was better in theory than in practice. “I really regretted saying that,” recalls Cheung. “During the movie, I got so depressed. My character got changed so many times. Wayne kept changing his mind. I felt insecure. Then I got really angry at Wayne. It wasn’t a nice ride.”

Wang admits that there was some confusion about what he wanted from Cheung’s character.

“Yes, Jean is an ultra-big liar,” he says, pausing for a moment at Cheung’s amusing description. “But it is for the sake of playing the game of survival in Hong Kong. Lying is her protection.”

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Cheung was born in Hong Kong. She emigrated from the territory at age 8 when her father decided to pursue a business deal in France. When that fell through, he took the family to England for a holiday. On a whim, he settled the family in Kent.

It wasn’t until Cheung was 17 that she returned to Hong Kong. While there on holiday with her mother, Cheung was approached on the street by a modeling scout who coaxed her to join an agency. Cheung soon found herself featured in top glossy magazines and local television commercials. The next year, she won the high-profile Miss Hong Kong pageant. Almost immediately, she began starring in movies as the helpless but beautiful girlfriend of the hero.

For the first few years of her cinematic career, Cheung was a “vase.” “That’s what the Chinese call a film star who just holds the flowers and looks pretty,” she explains. “Acting for me was just being there and doing expressions.

“I didn’t take my career seriously. I just did it because it was well-paid and I didn’t want to become a secretary or anything.” Cheung pauses, then adds, “Actually, what I really wanted to be was a hairdresser.”

During the early years, film critics routinely blasted Cheung for her lack of emotional range. The turning point came when Wong Kar-Wai (“Chungking Express,” “Happy Together”) cast her as a gangster’s prim country cousin in his directorial debut, “As Tears Go By.”

“Wong Kar-Wai was the first person who ever asked any acting of me,” says Cheung. “He asked me to deliver something from my heart.” He also made clear distinctions between lazy acting--the kind “vases” do--and quality acting.

“I learned things from him I can’t repay,” says Cheung, who starred in two other Wong Kar-Wai films. After “Tears,” she became a lead actress who was sought after by reputable local directors like Stanley Kwan and Mabel Cheung.

For the Hong Kong actress these days, the term “local director” is more likely to mean Bruno Dumont than Wong Kar-Wai. When Cheung looks out of her window most mornings now, she sees the Notre Dame and the Seine, not the Bank of China building or the South China Sea. Cheung has moved to Paris to live with Assayas, who, since directing her in “Irma Vep,” has become her boyfriend.

Cheung says she feels renewed in Paris. “I have just been walking around, discovering things--a little shop, a little cafe, a little street. Not like a tourist anymore.”

And although “Irma Vep” played well in France, Cheung revels in the fact that she can walk the streets of Paris without being recognized, an impossibility in Hong Kong. “Even if I was famous here, people wouldn’t care,” says Cheung. “That’s the French.”

Cheung has no plans yet to act in an Assayas film again. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to work with your boyfriend. I’d prefer to work with a stranger, you know, someone I don’t live with,” she says.

“You have more energy for the role that way. Sure I would work with him if he wrote a part that I would beg him for. But so far, I haven’t gotten that desperate yet.”

Cheung does expect to return to Hong Kong, if only for work. “Maybe one day I will want to move back, who knows?” she says. “But if Olivier and I want to be together, it’s easier for me to be in Paris.”

She may star in Wong Kar-Wai’s untitled next project. “I hope before I grow too old I can work with him again,” she says. But until that happens, Cheung says she’s content just to practice her French with the city’s taxi drivers, wander the streets and take in a martial arts class or two. Just in case.

‘[Director] Wong Kar-Wai was the first person who ever asked any acting of me. He asked me to deliver something from my heart.’