After the acclaim she received for her performance as a lonely bar-girl in Days Of Being Wild, Maggie Cheung had to plan her next move carefully. Everyone wanted a piece of the actress described by director Wong Kar-Wai as "the Catherine Deneuve of Hong Kong cinema". Cheung had done the low-budget comedies, the action flick with Jackie Chan and now the art film. Then, one day, she got an unusual script in the post. It was not, for a change, from Hollywood, calling for her to play the exotic yet deadly sidekick of Stallone/Van Damme/Schwarzenegger in Explosive Instinct 2. It wasn't even an elaborate costume drama offering her the role of ruler's mistress ("whenever they cast a Chinese actress in a film, it has to be The Last Emperor"). It was a French script about a past-his-prime Polanski-esque director attempting to remake the 1916 classic Les Vampires with a Chinese martial arts/art-house starlet in the central role of Irma Vep. Clue: they didn't want Cheung to play the Polanski-esque director.

"Of course, the character wasn't actually called 'Maggie Cheung', but I knew who it was supposed to be." Cheung took the part on instinct. Looking at the beauty of her face, at the delicacy with which she holds herself, and the grace with which she eats, you know she was never going to be comfortable as a Stallone sidekick. Why not play herself?

"Besides," she says, "I wanted to see Paris."

The gamble paid off. Irma Vep is a very funny satire about pretentious French cinema (lecherous directors on the verge of a crack-up, wardrobe mistresses falling in love with their stars) that managers to retain the best aspects of pretentious French cinema (the hypontic visuals and, many would have it, the new Catherine Deneuve in its leading lady).

Mention the Catherine Deneuve comparison to Cheung and she is horrified. "Who said that? When? No, he can't have said it, I just don't want to be dubbed the new anyone. I finally have these new options open to me. What if I go back to doing martial arts films, or slapstick?" (Wong Kar-Wai now says that on second thoughts Brigitte Lin is the Catherine Deneuve of Hong Kong cinema; Maggie Cheung is the Isabelle Adjani.)

Between the ages of eight and 12, Cheung grew up in England, where she had posters of the Bay City Rollers and ELO on her walls. She was of the generation seduced by Quadrophenia. "I thought it was amazingly beautiful. It really stayed with me when I went back to Hong Kong."

When she went home, she found herself treated "far better" than she deserved. "They thought I was special because I was from England. Later, even before I had proved myself, they thought I was better than just a local Chinese actress. They thought that I must know more."