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Why isn't Maggie Cheung a Hollywood star?
By SUSAN DOMINUS (New York Times)
Updated: 2004-11-16 14:52

Cheung's face is everywhere in Hong Kong. Head to the pharmacy, and she smiles at you from an Oil of Olay promotional ad behind the counter. Walk by the newsstand, and she's on the cover of Chinese Elle and on the billboards at the bus stop. An ad campaign she did for Ericsson hand-held phones in the late 90's was so successful it was cited as a case study in the Harvard Business Review. An entire row of DVD's is devoted to her at the massive HMV on the way to Victoria Park. Having significantly reduced the brutal pace of her filmmaking, Cheung continues to take on numerous promotions, figuring that it's easier to make money in a few days of empty work than in a few months of another action film.

In September, when I visited Cheung in Hong Kong, she had just returned from the Vuitton party in Shanghai -- a disaster, she said, with photographers popping out of nowhere at the arrival of her current boyfriend, Guillaume Brochard, a Frenchman with a jewelry business. She enjoyed only a few days of rest before the shoots for the mobile-phone ads. Out late the night before, she looked tired but still a good 10 years younger than her age. "They don't know I was out last night," she whispered in English, as the mobile-phone reps scrambled around, trying to find appropriate pieces of wardrobe, while a makeup artist tended to her.

Cheung, who helped design her own theatrical makeup in "Hero," occasionally took one brush or another from the makeup artist to do the work herself. Although she clearly knows what she's doing -- she teased her eyelashes out, transforming herself from the coolly disheveled Emily of "Clean" to the elegant beauty of "In the Mood For Love" -- makeup is her least favorite part of her job. During the shooting of "In the Mood," for 15 months she went to bed at 8 a.m., was picked up at noon to arrive on set by 1 p.m. for hair and makeup, then shot until late in the night, a schedule that it's hard to imagine Nicole Kidman being asked to tolerate.

While her old friend Ray started pinning up her hair, Cheung ate a bowl of rice noodles and someone put in front of her a Hong Kong sweet -- a deep-fried French toast sandwich with peanut butter slathered in between, which she snacked on as Ray finished up. Cheung, who'd shown up in black clogs, jeans and a long-sleeved brown T-shirt, disappeared for an instant, returning in a slinky black dress for the shoot. It was a rapid-fire transformation that suddenly revealed the single curving line of her body.

In the next room, the shooting started, with Cheung holding the cellphone up to her face, propping one leg on a box, hoisting the dress up to show some leg, improvising on the various attitudes a cellphone can apparently inspire. Chatting between shots, Cheung talked about all the traveling she does, the regular 12-hour flights between Hong Kong and Paris, where she found an apartment a few years ago to escape the press. For most of her life, she has lived somewhere between two cultures: when she was 8, her family moved to Kent, England, where she lived until she was discovered on the street on a brief visit to Hong Kong when she was 17.

"No matter where I'm going, I feel like I'm leaving something behind," she said. "Every time I get on a plane, I cry. The flight attendants on Cathay Pacific must think I'm mad." She laughed and did an imitation of herself sobbing into her flight pillow.

To Cheung, it seems unavoidable that an actress be "sad deep down," not so much as a job requirement but as a result of the job itself. Through the roles, she said, "you experience a lot more pain than normal people -- your mom dies, your dad dies, your boyfriend chucks you, you live in the street, and you're really going through these emotions. You're trying to know what it feels like to watch a man die in front of you, as if you've really lived it. Once that division is gone, it gets blurry -- you look back at a shoot and think, was I really that sad because in the film my boyfriend didn't like me -- or was it something else, something real?"

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