MAGGIE CHEUNG WALKED AWAY FROM ACTING 20 YEARS AGO, BUT HER LEGEND ENDURES

Last year, at the peak of the awards run for Past Lives, the film’s star Greta Lee was asked in an interview who her dream collaborators were. The actor proceeded to name-check some of the usual Hollywood power players, including Greta Gerwig and Tilda Swinton. Then she threw a curveball: “I also would love to pull Maggie Cheung out of retirement and make her work with me,” Lee said. “That is on my bucket list.”

When Lee gave that answer, Cheung—the Hong Kong actor best known to Western audiences as the star of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep—had been missing in action for almost two decades. Even at her most prolific, Cheung was willfully elusive when it came to Hollywood, passing on opportunities to appear in blockbusters like X2: X-Men United. She told The New York Times in 2004: “If I start making films like that…I’d feel like I was cheating. And I don't want half the world—we have 1.3 billion people in China—to know I'm cheating. That matters to me. I have more pride than that.”

Instead, after topping the US box office with the wuxia epic Hero—the first Chinese-language movie to do so—and winning the best actress prize at Cannes in 2004 for the Assayas film Clean, she pronounced herself “fulfilled as an actress” and promptly turned her back on the profession. She had already conquered the West on her own terms. In the ensuing years, she became a modern-day Greta Garbo—an enigmatic, prodigious film actor who voluntarily cut her storied career short at its very pinnacle.

“She essentially has the same amount of credits as someone like Meryl Streep—but 20 years less time. That's unbelievable,” Lee tells me. “It’s tragic that she is not even more widely recognized and known as one of the greatest performers and actors of our time. I really feel that way about her.”

In the last few years, it seems more and more people—especially, younger people—feel the same way. On the social media accounts of film institutions like Criterion and Mubi, stills of Cheung from Irma Vep and In the Mood for Love are a curiously common presence. On the social movie platform Letterboxd, she’s a popular subject of breathless adulation. And on Film Twitter, a new generation of supporters post fancams in her honor, as if she were the hot new teen star on a Netflix series. Frozen in celluloid, the now 59-year-old Cheung has somehow become a poster girl for cinema’s multicultural present.

“I joke with my colleagues [that] when Mubi have a slow social media day, they just post a picture of Maggie Cheung on a motorcycle, and then it's hearts, hearts, hearts,” says Kimberley Sheehan, programmer of Maggie Cheung: Films of Romance, Melancholy and Magic, a retrospective on the actor’s work that opened at BFI Southbank in London this month and runs until October. “For us, [this] sort of retrospective was long overdue,” Sheehan says, noting the range and depth of Cheung’s filmography.

When the BFI screened several Cheung films in 2021, as part of a Wong Kar-wai retrospective, they found that young viewers in particular tended to respond to Cheung’s work. “Seeing a lot of the young people who were really engaged, coming to the cinema, it's like, ‘Oh, you don't even know you are about to go on a journey,’ and I'd love to be the place that you discover more of Maggie Cheung."

Part of the renewed passion around Cheung began to crystallize during the pandemic, when In the Mood for Love—among many things, a film about deep, unfulfilled longing—experienced a resurgence as an unlikely COVID watch. Film at Lincoln Center—one of the world’s most influential cinematic institutions—screened the film at a drive-in in September 2020, as a way to coax audiences back to theaters. The following year, A24 and HBO Max released Assayas’s limited series remake of Irma Vep, which featured Hollywood stars like Alicia Vikander and Kristen Stewart in a show that seemed to function as both a revisitation of the themes he’d explored with Cheung in the 1996 film and a kind of séance for the woman he knew.

“It was almost like a two-pronged attack within the 2020s that kept her within the public eye, even though she had been out of the public eye for a long time,” says Curtis Tsui, a senior producer at the Criterion Collection, who shepherded the Criterion releases of several Cheung starrers.

Around the same time, Cheung’s peers and former costars Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung were suddenly enjoying late-career Hollywood victory laps. Yeoh won a best actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once; Leung played the scene-stealing villain in the Marvel blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. From Minari to Past Lives, mainstream American movies were beginning to tell Asian stories with nuance and complexity. Where was Maggie Cheung, an equal of Leung’s and Yeoh’s in every way, revered by a new generation of filmmakers, with seemingly nothing to impede her from acting in a few more movies?

“I don't think that Maggie has made all the movies she should have made or could have made,” Assayas, who was married to Cheung from 1998 to 2001, tells me, in a Zoom call from the French countryside. “That’s what’s most frustrating.”

In many ways, the circumstances of Cheung’s upbringing would foreshadow the global, border-defying reach of her work. Born in Hong Kong to Shanghainese parents, she spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the United Kingdom before moving back to Hong Kong at 18. That intercontinental background would make her a real polyglot—in Clean and Center Stage, two of her most acclaimed performances, she would perform fluently in English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese.

When Cheung began to act in the mid ’80s, Hong Kong’s entertainment industry was in the throes of a true golden age, with maverick filmmakers like John Woo, Patrick Tam, and Ann Hui innovating cinematic styles that would influence the entertainment industries of Hong Kong’s neighbors in Asia and later, Hollywood itself. “[That genre experimentation] created this kind of star system where these actors were given so many different things to do, from stunts to weepies,” says Dennis Lim, director of programming for film at Lincoln Center. “Maggie is exemplary as a screen actress, but I think if you look at some of the other popular figures of Hong Kong cinema at the time, you see a comparable range in the work.”

The range Cheung displayed in these films is staggering. In a decade or so, she made audiences swoon as one of the star-crossed lovers in the romantic drama Comrades: Almost a Love Story, broke hearts as the doomed silent film star Ruan Lingyu in the kaleidoscopic biopic Center Stage, and grew from playing Jackie Chan’s long-suffering girlfriend in the martial arts comedy Police Story to becoming an action hero herself in Johnnie To’s superhero flick The Heroic Trio. Deftly navigating the demands of populist blockbusters while giving herself entirely to the arthouse fare that would take her to the world’s film festivals, Cheung would prove herself more than an obedient Galatea to cinema’s Pygmalions.

“I don't think it's an accident that all of these filmmakers went to her as much as any of the more populist filmmakers,” Tsui says. “It's a really interesting performer space that she occupies because she really can bridge that gap between what we often disparagingly call ‘low culture’ and ‘high culture’—it doesn't really matter in her hands.”

That was the context in which Assayas, the French filmmaker behind Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria, met Cheung in 1994, when he juried at the Venice Film Festival and she attended as one of the stars of Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time. Immediately, he was struck by her star persona.

“It’s not just that Maggie felt like a movie star, it's more like she felt like the modern version of what a movie star could be—and no one had really tried that.” The stars of a previous era were characterized by grandness and self-importance, the director suggests, propped up by studios and a network of connections. “Maggie was absolutely not like that,” Assayas says. “She was the modern world. She was part of what was changing in filmmaking at that time. I think that things don't change in filmmaking if you don't have the right actors and Maggie was instrumental in a movement that transformed world cinema.”

Assayas was so inspired by that meeting in Venice that he would immediately start writing what would become Irma Vep. (“It was love at first sight—but it was [just] at first sight on my side. I think she hardly noticed me,” he tells me, laughing.)

When he went to Hong Kong to scout actors for Irma Vep—assuming that a superstar like Cheung would never deign to do an indie—he realized that she stood apart from her peers. “I thought a lot of Hong Kong movie stars were like Maggie. Once I had met many Hong Kong movie stars, I realized that Maggie was on her own,” he says. “She was completely unique.”

Even in 1995, the Hong Kong filmmaker Kirk Wong, who was helping Assayas with casting, told him that she was impossible to reach. “He kept on telling me, ‘No one knows where she is, people don't even know if she's actually in Hong Kong or she wants to make movies,’” Assayas recalls. (Eventually, Assayas met Cheung through a chance encounter with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who told him that he ran into Cheung almost daily and set them up to meet for drinks at a bar in Lan Kwai Fong.)

Star and director eventually fell in love on the set of Irma Vep, a film where Assayas explores the tensions between art and commercial entertainment but most of all, exults in the magnetism of Cheung, playing a version of herself. They married soon after—but just three years later, famously signed their divorce papers on the set of Clean, their second and final film together.

“The strange thing is, we lived together a few years, we were briefly married, but we were not yet together when we made Irma Vep and we were not together anymore when we made Clean—which always sounds a little weird to me, because normally it's two people who live together and who are in love [who make art],” Assayas tells me. “But I think we were satisfied with just the real-life relationship. We didn't need to put a movie on top of it. And maybe making Clean together was a way of making sense of our relationship and healing the wounds. But you don't heal those wounds, you don't really.”

“She spent a year in Hong Kong [making In the Mood for Love]. I mean, ultimately, it wrecked our relationship,” he recounts, with a laugh, “because she spent a year in Hong Kong, and I was myself shooting a very complex, expensive period piece [Sentimental Destinies] in provincial France. And so all of a sudden, we were really on two different planets.… It was created by cinema and it was in a certain way destroyed by cinema, I guess.”

On the set of Clean, Assayas recalls: “I told her, ‘Maggie, it's really great I'm making this film for you, which I imagined for you.’ And there was a double take and she said, ‘But Olivier, my present to you is that I'm here and we're making it together.’ And somehow, I think it kind of, for me, eased the pain.”

In the years since Clean, Cheung’s only substantial role in a movie has been in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009, where she played the aunt of Mélanie Laurent’s character Shosanna in one scene. In the end, the director decided to cut the scene for storytelling purposes; although various home-video releases of the film have included deleted scenes, Cheung’s scene, her only real big-screen acting work since 2004, has never seen the light of day. (Asked to comment for this piece, Tarantino declined to participate through his publicist.)

In a red carpet interview, Cheung said about Inglourious Basterds: “It’s fine. When you've been in enough films, you’ve seen that happening enough times to other actors.… For me, it’s a normal thing. The most important thing in the end, does it work in the film?”

“Quentin Tarantino was head of the jury in Cannes when she won Best Actress for Clean,” Assayas tells me. “Quentin Tarantino really liked her in Clean and that's why he wanted to use her in Inglourious Basterds. But I don't think it's Tarantino's best film, and I am not sure the part he gave to Maggie was that exciting. There was a crossroad there. I mean, if something had happened on Tarantino's film, my guess is that possibly she would still be making movies.”

In 2010, there was a sudden surge in her output as an actor. First, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Hot Summer Days, directed by longtime Wong Kar-wai collaborator Wing Shya in 2010. But more significantly, she began a collaboration with the British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, appearing in three of his video installations—the first of which was Ten Thousand Waves—a nine-screen installation where Cheung plays the sea goddess Mazu, a deity worshipped all over the Chinese diaspora.

Julien met Cheung through Tilda Swinton and the film critic B. Ruby Rich—friends of the actor— and the pair were instrumental in making the collaboration happen. “It just happened in a serendipitous manner,” Julien tells me, in a Zoom call from Sydney. “I think she was really interested in my work because it was like a nine-screen film installation. You could say she was moved by the story, the tragedy of the [Chinese] cockle shell pickers who came all the way from the Fujian province… And also, it wasn't going to be too demanding on her time and she could also visit different areas of China that she hadn't actually visited. I think also she was really curious about the art world.”

Cheung attended the premiere of the installation in ShanghART in Shanghai in 2010 and when the installation opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she came to that as well. The projects with Julien all happened in the early 2010s and thus far, they represent Cheung’s final screen appearances.

“I never genuinely believed she would retire, honestly,” Assayas says. “Once in a while she would mention that she felt she was too old, and I got angry with her: ‘I mean, Maggie, how can you say that?’ I mean, I genuinely think that Maggie is the greatest Chinese actress ever.

“I kept on telling her, ‘Maggie, look at the French star system. Look at Isabelle Huppert, look at Catherine Deneuve, look at Fanny Ardant. They are the major movie stars in France, and they are doing some of their best work and no, they are not 25. There's life beyond, the world has changed, acknowledge it, give it a chance.’”

Just six years after In the Mood for Love premiered at Cannes in 2000, the festival used a photo of Cheung from the film as their poster. The Cannes poster has become a time-honored tradition in the last few decades, an opportunity to spotlight some of cinema’s most indelible images (Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina kissing in Pierrot le Fou) and most iconic stars (Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman). In the years since In the Mood for Love came out, the image of Cheung in the film quickly ascended to that cinematic pantheon, becoming the 21st century equivalent of Marlene Dietrich in the suit from Morocco or Audrey Hepburn in the Givenchy dress from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

“Like with Dietrich in the suit, I think Maggie Cheung in the cheongsam is going to be something that stands the test of time in cinema history,” Tsui tells me.

The power of that image has made Cheung a perennial favorite in the fashion industry. During her career, the elegant actor was something of a fashion icon. In a time when Asian women rarely found themselves centered in Western fashion, she was a guest at the Met Ball, a muse of Nicolas Ghesquière’s, a regular presence in fashion magazines like Vogue and i-D, and a collaborator of Rodarte’s.

That legacy is still felt by a new generation of Asian designers. The Chinese American designer Kim Shui remembers first encountering an image of Cheung in a qipao from In the Mood for Love when she was growing up in Italy. “Growing up as a Chinese American woman in Italy, I never saw the qipao,” she says. “[Seeing her in it] definitely made an impact [on me], seeing how something like that can be twisted and modernized in a different way.”

Shui’s eponymous label has been celebrated for bringing a sexy, contemporary edge to traditional Chinese clothing—in that, she recognizes the influence of Cheung. “[My work is] like all the Irma Vep sex latex stuff with [the qipaos in] In the Mood for Love,” she says, laughing. “It's like the two movies fused and had a baby.”

Dylan Cao and Jin Kay, the designers behind the New York-based brand Commission, found themselves unconsciously referring to Cheung’s work from Comrades: Almost a Love Story in the brand’s latest collection, titled “American Dream?”, which interrogates the dream promised to immigrants. “The short-sleeved shirt with the white and red stripes [in our new collection],” Cao says, “we thought that was very Maggie Cheung in Comrades.”

But while these images are often how younger viewers have discovered Cheung, Lim believes she wouldn’t still be such a revered figure if the actual body of work wasn’t so formidable. “I think she's a performer who is so in control of physical gestures in a really microscopic way,” Lim says. “There's a certain kind of alchemy that happens between a certain kind of actor and the camera. And I think that is so true for Maggie…. She's one of the great screen actors of all time.”

Harris Dew, senior vice president and general manager of New York’s IFC Center, which routinely screens Cheung classics to packed houses, believes part of the reason Cheung’s work has been so embraced by a Western audience is her innate ability to commune directly with viewers. “The performances that resonate the strongest with most people are the ones where frequently she has very little dialogue and her performance is about inhabiting the space and being present on the screen,” Dew says. “That allows audiences across a really wide spectrum [to relate]. There's sort of no language intermediary between the two of them. I think it allows people—especially folks who are watching her films not in the language that's being spoken on the screen—to directly experience that performance.”

“There's an essence to her in the women that she plays,” Lee says. “It's so free. You're watching someone who seems so unburdened by what other people think—and that might sound odd because as an actor, ideally, you're playing a character. But that's one of the most hard-to-pin-down things about our greatest actors. Whether she is in Comrades or In the Mood For Love, you see in her this strength. She's so unbothered by any sort of gaze, by any sort of audience—which makes it so powerful.”

When Lee shot Past Lives’s climactic ending scene, it was Cheung’s work that emboldened her. “It was so essential for me to see somebody who was free of the white gaze, in order to play [the Past Lives character] Nora,” Lee tells me. “Could I just sit still and be motionless in the shot for this many minutes? How is that enough? In those really difficult moments, I would think about Maggie Cheung, and her face in a movie like Comrades, and how impactful that was—and how validating it was—for me to see someone like her just take [up] the space, eat up the camera.”

“Maggie invented a modern way of being a Chinese actress, and no one else had done that before,” Assayas says. “So she is a role model for [Asian] actresses, the younger generation.”

In the years since her abdication, Cheung has been spotted everywhere except on screen. There she was, in 2010, wearing matching sunglasses with Karl Lagerfeld and then posing with John Galliano at a Dior show. In 2016, she was spotted front row at the Louis Vuitton show in Paris, with LV CEO Michael Burke. And in 2019? Spotted buying bras at a roadside stall in Hong Kong.

Last year, as her great collaborator Wong Kar-wai released a series that was said to be the third in a trilogy with In the Mood for Love and 2046, there was some speculation she might be coaxed back to the screen. Instead, Cheung turned up DJ-ing at a Gucci party in Hong Kong and starring in a new advertisement for Olay.

Professionally, the only goal she’s made clear publicly is a desire to explore other talents. “I’d like to paint and compose music, which means everything to me,” she said in 2007. “My goal is to edit and score films. Maybe I'll discover I'm not talented that way, but I want to try."

In that way, Clean contains some clues to Cheung’s future, in hindsight. Playing a former disc jockey trying to get clean from old addictions and restart her life—this time, as a Nico-esque singer—she sings spare, gauzy dream-pop songs written and produced by David Roback of Mazzy Star. “[Roback] was a great producer for Maggie,” Assayas says. “The two songs they recorded together were really good.” At one point, Assayas says he also talked to Ron Sexsmith and the Magnetic Fields’s Stephin Merritt about potential collaborations with Cheung. “[Sexsmith] liked the idea, same thing with Stephin Merritt,” he says. “And then we separated and then things kept on going, it just moved in another direction.”

In 2014, a poorly received set at the Strawberry Music Festival in China left Cheung admittedly so embarrassed she couldn’t face people for a year. “All my friends in the movie business couldn’t accept me, they scolded me. After that it took me about a year to be able to stand up and say, ‘It’s okay!’” she said on the Chinese variety show Master in the House. “Why, because of those things you all said, I have to give up playing this game? I don’t think it’s fair. So I want to keep on playing, until the day when I decide I don’t want to play anymore.”

“From ages 18 to 35, I didn’t have my own life and I didn’t know anyone outside of the entertainment industry,” she said in an interview at the 2013 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. “Everyone was flattering and protecting me. Only now do I know how difficult it is to be a good person, and I am learning how.”

When Garbo walked away from Hollywood in the ’40s, she walked away to become immortal, preserving her legend after the embarrassment of her 1941 flop Two-Faced Woman. But when Maggie Cheung walked away from cinema 20 years ago, at the peak of her career, it seemed she did it to become human.

“Maggie Cheung's a true artist,” Julien tells me. “She is an incredibly skilled, amazing performer, and she is also in a way developing as an artist… I think she’s really searching for something else—for a higher sphere, I would say. I think that has to be respected.”

When I began work on this story in the spring, I reached out to Cheung’s publicist of several years, trying to see if she might be open to doing an interview. It only took two weeks to get a polite but firm rejection. “Ms. Cheung has decided not to participate in the interview.” her publicist wrote in an email. “She did not give a reason, but she’s been turning down almost all press opportunities for quite awhile.”

She turned down BFI’s invitation to participate in the retrospective as well. “It does add to the mystique,” Sheehan tells me. “It's almost more fitting she's not coming.”

“I think perhaps when somebody says ‘No,’ in a way, it creates an aura,” says Julien. “Which is something which is felt in an intergenerational way.”

Even when Assayas reached out to her for the Irma Vep series, she wrote him a letter through her agent. “It was a nice letter but it was very much at a distance,” he says. “The answer was something like, ‘Oh, I have projects of my own. Do whatever you want. I mean, it's your story. I'm fine with that, I'm comfortable with that. But in terms of getting involved, no thank you. If I want to get back into filmmaking, it'll be on my own terms.’”

At the end of Comrades, we watch Cheung in close-up as her character, a Chinese immigrant in New York, hears about the untimely passing of the singer Teresa Teng, over the radio in her immigration lawyer’s office in Chinatown. The news washes over Cheung’s face in quiet devastation. As we watch her walk around downtown Manhattan, we hear the rest of the news announcement: ‘“Big cities or small villages, people could hear her songs anytime, anywhere.… People said, if only there are Chinese, you can hear Teresa’s songs.”

Comrades ultimately offers a happy ending. At the very last minute, as she pauses in front of a shop window to watch a broadcast about Teng’s death, Cheung’s character is unexpectedly reunited with the man she lost a lifetime ago in Hong Kong. At the end of the day, the film seems to tell us, it’s the art we seek refuge in that ultimately becomes our home—a lonely person’s path to connection, an invisible community’s great unifier.

I thought about that recently, during a weeknight screening of Irma Vep at MoMA Film. Like many of Cheung’s classics, an Irma Vep screening has become rather commonplace in New York. And with the film’s availability on streaming, there’s hardly a reason to run out and pay $17 to watch it on the big screen.

But on that Thursday afternoon, in a packed theater in midtown Manhattan, I joined an enthusiastic crowd of different ages and nationalities to watch a 28-year-old film, laughing at its jokes as if we were hearing them for the first time and watching in rapture, as Cheung stalked through a Paris hotel as Sonic Youth blared over the soundtrack.

Big cities or small villages, if only there are lovers of cinema, Maggie Cheung is eternally walking down an alleyway in ’60s Hong Kong, slinking through a Parisian rooftop in a latex catsuit, walking the streets of Manhattan with the songs of Teresa Teng in her heart.

“She arguably is one of our last true movie stars,” Lee says. "It's completely different—that aura, that mystique. That innate and effortless magnetism that can exist within someone.… We don't really have that anymore.”