Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung was born on September 20, 1964, in Hong Kong to Shanghainese parents. Her family emigrated to England when she was eight, and she studied at St Edmund's School in Canterbury before returning to Hong Kong at 18 in 1982. In 1983 she entered the Miss Hong Kong pageant, placing first runner-up and winning the Miss Photogenic award, which led to modeling and television work.

Her breakthrough came with the comedy Prince Charming (1984), followed by Police Story (1985) opposite Jackie Chan, which made her a leading star of Hong Kong commercial cinema. After a two-year break from acting starting in 1994, she returned internationally in Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996), a film built around her own persona as a Hong Kong actress working in France; she later married Assayas.

Cheung's most widely recognized role came in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), playing a woman drawn into a restrained affair with a neighbor in 1960s Hong Kong; the film was ranked fifth on Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films ever made. In 2004 she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for Clean, becoming the first Chinese actress to receive the honor.

Her final film role was in Ten Thousand Waves (2010), and she formally retired from acting in 2013.