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Bedroom Pinup
TIME talks to Hong Kong actor/singer boy Leslie Cheung
BY STEPHEN SHORT
Thursday, May. 3, 2001 Leslie Cheung is Hong Kong's great male diva. The flamboyant singer and actor talks candidly with TIME's Stephen Short about movies, fame and growing up. Edited excerpts:
TIME: You are sometimes called one-take Leslie, because directors get what they want immediately. Is that so?
Cheung: The longest scene I ever shot was with Wong Kar-wai in "Days of Being Wild." Maggie Cheung and I are having a conversation in bed about her cousin or something like that. Anyway, it took two days and 39 takes to shoot. Wong did not give us a clue as to what role he wanted us to play. Even when Maggie and I asked what was wrong with the previous 38 takes, he wouldn't tell us.
TIME: Have you ever turned down a project from Kar-wai?
Cheung: I'm usually Kar-wai's first pick. I'm his favorite. Even for "Chungking Express" he approached me first, before Tony Leung. But as you know I was so busy at that time. I was doing "Shanghai Grand." I was working with Peter Chan on "He's a Woman, She's a Man." So Kar-wai calls me up and says, 'Leslie, I've got this great story. Would you like to try doing a film with Faye Wong?' At that time I had some reservations. I said to him, 'Kar-wai, can she really act?' I told him it would be delightful to work with him, but sadly not at that time, as I was too busy. So then he approached Tony Leung. He also asked me to do "Fallen Angels," for which Leon Lai got picked. Later Kar-wai called me up for "Happy Together." Andy Lau originally wanted to be in the movie, but I'm not sure what happened to that. I was doing "Viva Erotica" at the time. So I spoke with Kar-wai again and thought his offer was quite reasonable, though I took some convincing. We talked schedules, terms, deadlines... Kar-wai's a very clever guy. He knows how to handle things.
TIME: Everybody I talk to wants to work with you. Who do you want to work with?
Cheung: I'm hoping to work with (Chinese actress) Zhang Ziyi next year. I think (singer) Karen Mok and her would be brilliant in a film. I'll have to pull some strings. The movie would be similar to "Beaches," the Bette Midler film. Interesting. Don't you think so?
TIME: You could put Karen and Ziyi in a Nescafe commercial and I'd pay good money to watch it. You were a huge Canto star in the '80s. What's changed since?
Cheung: Things are getting much more conservative. And politically correct. I'm lucky that I can still survive and maintain my place at the top. A lot of it is to do with the media. A few years back they never put anything positive in the tabloids. Take Tony Leung, for example. He wins the Best Actor award at Cannes. Now that should be huge news in Hong Kong, but all you get is a small piece in the corner of the paper about his award, and the main focus is about actress Carina Lau and who she's having an affair with. The media cater to gossip.
TIME: You must get asked about "Happy Together" all the time?
Cheung: Yes, although now I'm used to it. It's like a daily routine. But if someone tries to ask me an intellectual question in Hong Kong then I get quite stumped. It really shouldn't be like this.
TIME: Did you enjoy school in England?
Cheung: I had to make a lot of readjustments. There were racial problems, discrimination. But it enabled me to see things. I could take a train to London, for example. So I didn't feel lonely. My first bit of homesickness didn't happen for three months. I used to write letters to my parents and family every week. I think that started to pull us closer. During weekends I used to go to Southend- on-Sea to see my relatives; they ran a restaurant there, and I'd be a bartender. I also started performing. I was only 13 years old, but I'd do amateur singing every weekend.
TIME: Do you like Hong Kong?
Cheung: Hong Kong is so extravagant... It's too expensive. I'm too soft for Hong Kong. I don't always count myself as 'one of them.' And I don't put my litter outside my house anymore because people try to find things and sell them or whatever. Even if I go to Causeway Bay, reporters follow me. They know my car registration number, so whether I'm at the Mandarin Oriental coffee shop or Propaganda (a hip gay club) I'm followed.
TIME: You're agony uncle to many Chinese actresses, aren't you?
Cheung: I love them all very much. Twenty years ago I was also a newcomer, so I love to groom girls, tell them the pros and cons (of the profession). I scolded Karen Mok for not performing well enough at her recent concerts. But did you see I gave her a kiss on stage. She thanked me as her uncle for giving her a first chance.
To Fall from a Great Height
Leslie Cheung—movie star and pop idol—took a last, fatal step into the dark
BY RICHARD CORLISS
Was any actor as beautiful as Leslie Cheung? Did anyone bring to the gift of glamour the seductive insolence Leslie exuded? His first appearance in a film—his face soft and smooth, with lips that expertly puckered or pouted—had the impact of a struck match. The screen flared to life; suddenly there was heat, and the incense of sulfur. To see him as the hurtful teddy boy in Days of Being Wild, the proud warrior in The Bride with White Hair and the dominant demon romancer in Phantom Lover is to realize there's nothing more exhilarating than a trip to hell with him at the wheel.
Leslie (everyone from his co-workers to screaming fans called Cheung Kwok-wing by his English name) was gorgeous since his first TV appearance in a 1976 song contest. He matured in acting ability and the use of his smoldering charisma, but never seemed to age. "Guess how old he is," Hong Kong film folk would ask, then declare that Asia's perpetual bad boy was flirting with middle age—as suavely and as masterfully as he flirted with everything and everyone else. In his films, and in the spectacular concerts that had him crooning ballads one minute and flouncing in a Jean-Paul Gaultier gown the next, Leslie was the consummate tease. He performed a seven-veils dance for us, and we lost our heads to him.
He turned 46 last September, and he will forever stay that age. But he chose a drastic method of staving off wrinkles, a potbelly, the whims of a fickle public. Last Tuesday he scheduled a tea with his friend and former agent, Chan Suk-fan, at a favorite haunt, the Mandarin Oriental hotel. When he didn't show, Chan called Leslie, who was on the terrace of the hotel's 24th-floor gym. He said he'd meet her outside; he'd be right down. It was a final tease—a sick joke, really—for when Chan came out she found his body on the pavement. He had leapt to his death.
A fall from a great height: that befits a tragic hero or, in Leslie's case, a tragic diva. For if Brigitte Lin embodied the woman-man in such '90s films as Swordsman II and Ashes of Time, then Leslie was Asia's definitive man-woman. More persuasively so, because for Lin it was a role; for Leslie it was life. A gay man in a society intolerant of gays, he never explicitly acknowledged his homosexuality. But neither did he try to suppress it, as some Hong Kong stars have done. He was too much the showman, the exhibitionist, in his way the truth teller. He played the pining gay opera star in Farewell My Concubine, then Tony Leung Chiu-wai's caustic lover in Happy Together. Both movies were worldwide hits and gave him a notoriety that didn't quite do him justice. He was gay, yes, but he was mainly other: a luscious rebuttal to Hong Kong cinema's stern or strutting machismo.
He promenaded this otherness. It made him a star but obscured his talent. It is a gift to be beautiful; it is an art to know how to lend that beauty to a film character. An actor of commanding subtlety, Leslie rarely overstated an emotion because he knew what the camera saw: he knew the camera loved him.
What did his friends, fans and critics know? We know what it was like to see Leslie—to sense his charm, his pretty petulance and his danger—but not what it was like to be Leslie. He seemed so pleased in there, in the fairy-tale kingdom of Cheung, but he may have felt that his castle was crumbling, that his subjects were restless. (Tony Leung was landing the big roles Leslie wanted.) And perhaps the mirror told him he was no longer the fairest one of all.
The day after Leslie's death, his longtime lover, Daffy Tong Hok-tak, said that the star had tried killing himself with sleeping pills last November, and that he had been seriously depressed for 20 years. Twenty years! Back to the time of his first hit album; all through his reign as Canto-pop's top star and Hong Kong film's golden boy. If his eminence and allure could not make him happy, then he was a braver, more cunning artist than anyone suspected. Leslie Cheung danced before us, alluringly, and only let the seventh veil drop last week, revealing the desperate child beneath the diva's brilliant plumage.
Forever Leslie
BY RICHARD CORLISS
In the first minutes of Wong Kar-wai's 1990 Days of Being Wild, Leslie Cheung strikes up a chat with Maggie Cheung. She's lovely and lonely; he's smoldering and supercool. Out of the blue, he purrs a boast to Maggie: "You'll see me in your dreams tonight." Next day he comes by again, and she brags that she didn't dream of him. "Of course," he replies with practiced confidence, "you couldn't sleep at all."
That's our Leslie: suave, cocksure, with a touch of the brute (they love him for it) and a hint of sad solitude. A Canto-pop idol and film star since the late '70s, Cheung has been called "the Elvis of Hong Kong" by Canadian critic John Charles. He gets top dollar for film work, his new CD Forever Leslie is climbing the charts, and his concerts still pack 'em in around the world; for a pre-Christmas gig at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, tickets went—fast—for as much as $238.
At home he is catnip for the voracious paparazzi. "They follow me everywhere," he says. "They know my car numbers, so they're there whether I'm at the Mandarin Hotel Coffee Shop or at Propaganda (a hip new club). I don't even put my litter outside the house. People try to find things and sell them."
Cheung could qualify as a monument to pop longevity if he was not still in his glistening prime—and if he was not still so damned gorgeous. Any visitor to Hong Kong who mentions his name to a local will hear the same refrain: "Guess how old he is" (as if he kept a rotting portrait of himself in the attic). Cheung is 44, and if he has changed at all during his half-life in the public eye, it is to become more wily in the lavishing and husbanding of his allure. He simultaneously seduces and withdraws, flirts and forbids. He is the most cunning, provocative tease in Asian showbiz.
As an actor, he is terrifically versatile, at ease in art films (as Farewell My Concubine's conflicted gay opera star), action thrillers (as the sensitive young cop in A Better Tomorrow), fantasies (as Brigitte Lin's mountaintop lover in The Bride with White Hair), dark romances (as the haunted singer in The Phantom Lover) and fluffy comedies (as the music mogul in He's a Woman, She's a Man). Last year he played a psycho killer in Double Tap.
Inside these varied characters is the irreducible, enigmatic "Leslie": a beautiful man whose sexuality is a gift or a plague to those who fall under his spell. Typically, they love him and he leaves them; he must have said, "I don't love you" more times than anyone else in movies. But he doesn't just mesmerize the camera; he works subtle wonders before it. He glamorizes a scene in Days of Being Wild just by appraising himself in a full-length mirror while doing an expert cha-cha. And then, in unforgiving closeup, without moving a muscle, he will somehow change emotional temperature. You can see feelings rise in him like a blush or a bruise.
In concerts he woos staid Cantonese audiences until they are dancing en masse in front of the stage, votaries to the pop god. Their innocent ecstasy turns him on; Cheung has an almost naked love for being loved. In his year-long Passion tour, which concluded two weeks ago in Hong Kong, he wore eight Jean-Paul Gaultier outfits, in ascending order of outrageousness, from a white tux with angel wings to a naughty skirt (and long black wig). At his Toronto concert a voice cried out, "I love you, Leslie!"; he said, "I love you too, whether you're a boy or a girl." The line happens to be one he delivered in He's a Woman, She's a Man, but it winks at Cheung's androgynous appeal. With a soul both pensive and explosive, equally capable of derisive laughter and hot tears, Leslie is all man-woman.
Cheung enjoys this audacious role playing; his latest music video featured a pas de deux (with a Japanese male ballet dancer) so sexy that it was banned by TVB, Hong Kong's top channel. He also knows that it leads audiences to the suspicion—or compliment—that he is gay, though he has not publicly declared his sexual orientation. "It's more appropriate to say I'm bisexual," Cheung notes. "I've had girlfriends. When I was 22 or so, I asked my girlfriend Teresa Mo (his frequent co-star in TVB serials of the time) to marry me." As a guest on Mo's cable TV show last month, Cheung bantered, "If you'd agreed to marry me then, my life might have changed totally."
His life was eventful long before then. Cheung Kwok-wing was born the youngest of 10 children of a Hong Kong tailor—he made suits for William Holden and Alfred Hitchcock—and his wife. "I didn't have a happy childhood. Arguments, fights and we didn't live together; I was brought up by my granny." His nearest sibling was eight years older; Leslie says he was "the youngest and the loneliest. My brothers would be dating girls and I was left alone in the corner, playing GI Joe or with my Barbie doll. It was miserable. My father couldn't control his emotions, with me or my mother. I used to think, 'And this is what they call marriage.'"
At 12 he was sent to the Norwich School in Norfolk, England. "There were racial problems, discrimination," he says. "But I made friends there. And on weekends I'd go see my relatives in Southend-on-Sea, where they ran a restaurant. I was a bartender, and I'd do amateur singing." By this time he had chosen his English name. "I love the film Gone with the Wind. And I like Leslie Howard. The name can be a man's or woman's, it's very unisex, so I like it."
After a year studying textile management at the University of Leeds, he returned to Hong Kong and placed second (singing American Pie) in ATV's Asian Music Contest. His 1978 film debut, Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber, was notable only for his butt-baring. Still, filmmakers saw his appeal as a new kind of star: beautiful, tender, dangerous. He still has it, and better. He's James Dean with a mean streak, or a deeper Johnny Depp.
Cheung did smart star turns as the lovers of two beguiling specters in A Chinese Ghost Story and Rouge, and he would later earn international acclaim in Chen Kaige's Concubine—still his fullest, grandest performance. But it was Wong Kar-wai who illuminated the inner Leslie on the big screen. Days of Being Wild made him a '60s Ah Fei (shiftless youth) whose mistreating of women is his payback to the mother who deserted him; it won Cheung a Hong Kong Film Award for best actor. In Ashes of Time, cast as a martial-arts scoundrel, he ably anchored a film of top Chinese stars and rapturous visual splendor. In the not-so-gay drama Happy Together he taught Tony Leung Chiu-wai how an actor prepares.
The film opens with a stark scene of the two main characters having sex. "When we tried to shoot the love scene it really shocked Tony," Cheung recalls. "He refused to do it. For two days he was miserable, lying on his bed. So I went up to him and said, 'Look at me, Tony, I've gone through so many scenes kissing, touching girls, grabbing breasts, do you think I really enjoyed it? Just treat it as a job, a normal love scene. I'm not going to fall in love with you, and I don't want you to really have sex with me. You're not my type.' So he agreed to do the scene." In other words: Tony, dear boy, why not try acting?
Though Cheung has directed an hour-long music drama and an all-star anti-smoking film, he will keep acting; he soon joins Anita Mui and Karen Mok in a Stanley Kwan film, and hopes to work with Zhang Yimou and the Crouching Tiger princess, Zhang Ziyi. Still, forever-young Leslie is having midlife doubts about his standing in post-'97 Hong Kong. "I've worked bloody hard for 20 years," he says passionately. "I was penniless, dying hard for my groceries. I can now live in a reasonably sized detached house. I'm still very strong in Japan and Korea. But I may be a little passE in Hong Kong. The place is so extravagant, vulgar, expensive. I may be too soft for Hong Kong. I don't always count myself as one of them."
Leslie, dear boy, why not try looking at yourself in the mirror and doing an elegant cha-cha? You'll see what you've been and still are: phantom lover, concubine, sweet prince.
Reported by Stephen Short/Hong Kong