Maggie Cheung, Hong Kong's most celebrated actress, has spent the last ten years trying to unbecome a star. Her chosen path has taken her from the action-flick treadmill to cult movies like Irma Vep and this month's Chinese Box, in which her mystery-woman aura is on full throttle. Beyond Asia and her stack of awards, she remains an enigma.

One morning when she was twenty-nine, Maggie Cheung woke up and started to count all the movies she'd made. She kept counting till she got to the sixtieth-or-so title, and realized it was time to stop. Not just time to stop counting, but to stop making movies for a while. In Hong Kong, it's not so unusual for actors to make more movies than they can remember, especially when they have titles like Love Army(1985) and It's a Drink, It's a Bomb (1988). What is unusual is that Cheung managed to parlay a career that began as a teenage beauty queen into a series of costarring turns with Jackie Chan, though she had never intended to become a chop-socky heroine like her friend (and recent Bond girl) Michelle Yeoh. But being a star wasn't enough - Cheung wanted to learn to act.

Today, after working with maverick directors like Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan, she has more than reached her goal. She is the only three-time Best Actress of the Hong Kong Film Awards, the only four-time Best Actress of Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards, and was Best Actress again at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Kwan's Center Stage (a.k.a Actress , 1991). Last year she achieved icon status playing Hong Kong action star "Maggie Cheung" in Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep. This month she can be seen as a lost soul who encounters dying British journalist Jeremy Irons in Wayne Wang's Chinese Box, a bittersweet allegory of China's takeover of Hong Kong. The very down-to-earth, English-accented Cheung, now thirty-three, was spending quality time with an old friend who was about to have a baby in Los Angeles when we spoke.

CHUCK STEPHENS: Maggie, it must amaze people when they learn that you made over sixty movies between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine.
MAGGIE CHEUNG: It is a lot, isn't it? Unfortunately, though, I didn't really put enough of myself into the movies I did early in my career. I let people change me and did as I was told. That's why I work much less now: I need to enjoy every film I make, because I've done too many films that I didn't.

CS: You were born in Hong Kong, but you spent your school days in England, right?
MC: Yeah, and I was the only Chinese person in my school, so at an early age I got used to thinking I wasn't normal, that I wasn't one of the group. I was always conscious of the fact that I was different, so I tried not to be. I went through phases where I dyed my hair brown and really tried to blend in, but I was always conscious of what I wasn't.

CS: Was that a useful preparation for becoming an actor?
MC: I'm not sure, because for the first few years I was working, I didn't even know what an actor was; I only knew what a star was. At the time, I thought it was all about glamour and being a diva. When I moved back to Hong Kong at eighteen, I went from doing beauty pageants and modeling jobs to making movies in the space of the year, and it wasn't until much later that I realized it was important to concentrate on being good at what you do, not just on how you look.

CS: When did you begin trying to balance the two?
MC: It didn't happen suddenly. During the making of Wong Kar-Wai's first film as director, As Tears Goes By[1988], I started to realize that if you really want to act, you have to use different kinds of energies and strengths than you do if you're just making a career of being on magazine covers, of being "well-known". In a way, Wong Kar-Wai was my first acting teacher. He really gave me the confidence to believe that I could be serious about my work, and that acting could be appreciated as a skill and an art; that there was more to it than facial expressions and reaction shots. He helped me understand that it was more about working from within.

CS: Starring in Stanley Kwan's Center Stage must have been an important step too, not just because of the awards you won, but in the way it seemed to establish your career within the historical context of Chinese cinematic history - in a way, it's as much about you as about the character you play, Ruan Ling-yu, the Chinese Garbo.
MC: Because Ruan Ling-yu was an actress, and because she died at the age I was when I was making the film, twenty-five, there were many things about the part that I already knew from my own experience, like why her emotions changed when they did, and how people were controlling and actually ruining her. Fortunately, I live in a different time and having a very different personality from her. But I understand exactly why she said that line about words having the power to kill you and why she felt suicide was her only option. Not that I would ever let it happen to me. Just the opposite - my imclination is to just get my back up and fight for myself.

CS: Your long-running standoff with Hong Kong's gossip-magazine press is almost legendary.
MC: I think they'll just go on hating me, and there's nothing I can do about it. The things they want to talk about, I don't want to share. Like, "How many times did you go to the toilet yesterday?" Sometimes I feel like I should give them a list of the hair-care products I use, or whatever, and they'd be happy. And now, because I've made one French film and am spending so little time in Hong Kong, they attack me for speaking out against them in the Western press. They think I'm going against my own race, but that's ridiculous.

CS: Were you at all reluctant, after spending so much time finding out for yourself who Maggie Cheung was, to surrender yourself to Irma Vep, where you had to play someone else's version of Maggie Cheung?
MC: Well, to me it depended more on who Olivier Assayas was, and on what kind of director he was, rather than wondering what I was getting myself into. I really liked the way he shot his earlier films, and I had confidence in him for some reason. I also liked that it ws such a strange script. It's not at all the kind of script I'd get in Hong Kong; they wouldn't even think it was a film because it doesn't have a story. But I enjoyed the madness of that, and thought if nothing else I'd get to hang out in France. And it was such a small film that people in Hong Kong probably wouldn't even see it.

CS: How close is the Maggie in Irma Vep to the real Maggie?
MC: She's real to the extent that if the same things happened to me in real life, I'd react in pretty much the same way.

CS: You may have thought you'd just be making a little French movie that no one would see, but the end result had an impact on your personal life and your career.
MC: More on my personal life, I think. My suitcase has been back in the cupboard just once during the last two years. I've spent all my time running from one film festival to the next. Olivier and I were a two-man band on the run - always "on tour".

CS: It's no real secret that you and Olivier are romantically involved, but you seemed somewhat upset when Wong Kar-Wai made things public during an interview at Cannes last spring.
MC: Only because I don't appreciate people helping me out that way. I'm perfectly capable of announcing something like that - if I want to.

CS: Are you planning on taking the "next stop: Hollywood" route that so many Hong Kong film people have taken recently?
MC: The great thing about the position I'm in now is that I have the luxury to choose what I want to do; what I can't control is what comes to me. I've already siad no to some things. Right now I'm not even signing with an agent. I'd rather just move around with my suitcase and see where that takes me.

CS: Was making Chinese Box anything like a step in the Hollywood direction?
MC: Well, it wasn't the most - how should I put it? - organized production. Also I think it was more of a "Jeremy Irons film" than a Hollywood film. Things about the film changed in the course of making it that made me feel uncomfortable.

CS: But you must have been used to that sort of thing from making films with Wong Kar-Wai, who never has a finished script when he starts shooting.
MC: In a way, yeah, and that's what's holding things up with his next one, Beijing Summer. In order to shoot a film in China, you must show the government your script in advance, and how can he do that? He doesn't work that way at all. It may be that he'll have to change the title or shoot somewhere else, or make "Beijing" the name of a coffee shop in Macau or a motel somewhere on Kowloon.

CS: Now that you've spent all this time catching up with yourself, does that mean you won't be making action films anymore? Will there be no more Maggie Cheung fantasy flicks like Dragon Inn or The Heroic Trio [both 1992]?
MC: It doesn't mean that altogether, but I have to say that on a personal level I enjoy making the grown-up films more. Films like Heroic Trio are fun, but I don't like doing the action scenes. Physically, I'm not a figther at all. You won't get me out of a chair even to, say, go across the room and shake hands with Bill Clinton. I'm like a cat: I like to lie around and do nothing. The funny thing is, while I'm telling you all this, I'm also talking with some people in Hong Kong about doing a futuristic fantasy based on an old Chinese novel. I'm actually getting a little restless. And for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to feel like it might be fun to do something a bit silly. Even if it means I'll have to get out of my chair!

CHUNK STEPHENS
INTERVIEW April 1998