KEVIN THOMAS, A Career In Full Plume, from "Los Angeles Times", June 22nd, 1997, page 6, online
As 'Temptress Moon' boosts the profile of Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung, he's reviving a long-dormant singing career.
Leslie Cheung, the Hong Kong superstar and pop singer, has never been busier. He has a new film, Chen Kaige's exquisite "Temptress Moon." He is in the midst of a worldwide singing tour marking his return to the concert stage after a seven-year hiatus. And he is reaping international acclaim for his remarkable acting talent, which spans giddy classic screwball comedy to martial arts fantasies to the epic tragedy of Chen's 1993 "Farewell My Concubine."
In "Temptress Moon," which opens with the fall of the Quing Dynasty to 1911, Cheung plays a shirttail relative of an extravagantly decadent noble family and becomes obsessed with exacting revenge for their rotten treatment of him.
"Don't you think I'm more or less like John Malkovich in 'Dangerous Liasions?" Cheung asked of his role earlier this spring, sitting in the presidential suite of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The comparison is apt for Cheung's avenger specifically targets the family's beautiful heiress, played by Gong Li, the leading lady of "Farewell My Concubine."
It comes as a surprise to learn that Cheung is 41, for he's so often described as boyishly handsome and looks at least a decade younger. What's not so surprising is that he's a world-class charmer, secure in his stardom. He can focus on you with the intensity of a Kirk Douglas, establish an instant rapport and regale you with so many off-the-record remarks you have to steer him back on course.
"There were a lot of misfortunes in making 'Temptress Moon,'" Cheung recalled. "Chen changed the leading actress several times. Three actually faced the camera. Then they would vanish after two or three days. There were five or six before he asked Gong Li. It was a hell of a lot of work for me because I had to go through all of these auditions with them, and they didn't pay me extra!"
Cheung said these changes of casting added five or six months to the production schedule, a development that, he says, made "Temptress Moon" twice as costly as the more elaborate "Farewell My Concubine."
Yet he makes it clear that it's worth whatever it takes to work for Chen. After all, Cheung had spent six months to Beijing learning Mandarin, not to mention mastering the performing style of Chinese opera, to appear in "Farewell My Concubine."
Hard work has clearly paid off for Cheung, who has already made some 70 films, among them a memorable dozen or so familiar to foreign film enthusiasts. Cheung has worked with a number of major Hong Kong directors, among them John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai (best known for "Chungking Express") and Stanley Kwan.
In Cheung's most recent film, "Happy Together," he and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai play lovers who have traveled to Argentina to seek new experiences. Wong Kar-Wai wrote and directed, winning the best director prize at the Cannes International Film Festival, Cheung's own life would make a movie, "My father was a famous tailor -- the tailor king of Hong Kong," he said, "He made suits for Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, William Holden -- all the big stars. I'm the youngest of 10 children, and I was brought up by my grandmother."
"It's kind of sad: Suddenly, my father was too busy for us, and my parents lived apart from us. I felt distant from them. He took a second wife, and for a while all three of them lived together. There was a lot of quarreling. It was a mess."
At 13, Cheung got permission from his father to go to boarding school in England. He went on to Leeds University to study textile design, following his father's desire rather than his own. He also started singing with a band at a relative's restaurant, where he worked weekends.
Then Cheung's father suffered a stroke, bringing Cheung back to Hong Kong to stay by his side.
"This was the end of 1976 and early 1977. I had no plans; there I was, feeling like I was hanging in the middle of nowhere," Cheung said. He started selling Levi jeans to make some money.
"Some of my friends put my name in the Asian Amateur Singing Contest sponsored by a TV company. I won, and then I signed a contract with them to become a TV artist, a singer and an actor for TV serials, I did thousands of hours of TV before getting into movies."
As a singer and actor Cheung became a major heartthrob, but he put his singing career on the back burner to concentrate on filmmaking. Now he's returning to performing with a vengeance.
In the early '90s, Cheung established residence to Vancouver, and he now holds dual citizenship. "If you're living in a stable country, you never think of becoming a citizen somewhere else, do you?" he said, "You have to be prepared. I'm thinking about maybe living in London."
Wherever Cheung settles, he does not intend to slow down, even though he acknowledged: "I have to do something to become more relaxed. I have too little time for personal life and too much work. But after a month of doing nothing I would go crazy. Life without work means nothing to me."