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Why isn't Maggie Cheung a Hollywood star?
By SUSAN DOMINUS (New York Times)
Updated: 2004-11-16 14:52 Someone from the shoot called to Cheung, and she flashed a bright smile.
"Sorry," she said, heading back to the shoot, untouchably glamorous once again.
On a computer screen someone enlarged a close-up of Cheung's face resting on her
hand, as the cameras continued to keep shooting, and the image stayed there for
the rest of the shoot. It was a shot of a flawless, serious face, but a face
that also looked ambiguously profound, the kind of face onto which its admirer
could project seduction, or contemplation, or defiance, or sorrow.
Being a Hong Kong star has some of the advantages of being a Hollywood star,
among them comparative luxury. Cheung's well-situated Hong Kong apartment is
done up simply in natural woods and elegant beige, its floor-to-ceiling windows
opening onto a stunning view of Repulse Bay below. The windows in the back of
the apartment, tinted a dark color, reflect the downside of such celebrity: not
long after Cheung moved in, photos of her inside her home started appearing in
the local tabloids, shot from a strip of road half a mile away.
"If I was drinking something, they said, 'Oh, she got dumped, she's so
miserable she's turning to drink,"' she said, pulling the shades down on that
window as the sun set. "Or if my mother and sister came over, they said, 'She's
so miserable she needs her family to support her through this hard time."'
Cheung had the window treated, but the paparazzi -- who treat her particularly
harshly because she rarely gives interviews -- kept up the bad press. One local
magazine shot her current boyfriend leaving the apartment, then badly
photo-shopped the image so it looked as if he were making an obscene gesture to
photographers with his hand. Waiters and restaurateurs are forever tipping off
the press so that when Cheung tries to leave a restaurant, a phalanx is waiting
for her.
Even Assayas, from whom she's been separated for years, can't cross a hotel
lobby in Shanghai without being swarmed, because of his former association with
Cheung. "In China, they care even more about their stars than in America,"
Assayas said, "and they're also less shy about approaching them. I don't know
what it is. It's less of an individualist society, maybe -- it's like they feel
their stars belong to them, are part of the family -- they're someone in the
family who made good, and they feel they belong to them." Assayas told me a
story about accompanying Cheung to a restaurant and escorting her to the door of
the ladies' room. "She opened the door, the door closed behind her -- and then I
just heard this girl start screaming," he said.
The costs of Cheung's celebrity don't come, however, with all the perks that
offset those inconveniences for Hollywood stars. Her apartment is exquisitely
placed but hardly vast, and no entourage follows her from shoot to shoot; on
set, no luxury trailer allows her to get in character amid down throw pillows
and freshly cut flowers. No one so much as tells her she's fabulous, she said,
laughing, which is partly a cultural difference. "Words like 'fabulous,'
'wonderful,' 'great,' 'absolutely gorgeous' -- they don't exist in Cantonese.
It's good, or it's O.K. That's it. It's very blunt, Cantonese. I appreciate that
there are no fake words, but it's hard to switch channels, sometimes, after I've
spent time in France. I'm just learning to use more generous words myself -- but
you know, 'gorgeous' -- I just can't go to that extreme."
Cheung said she never wanted to be a movie star: she wanted to be a
hairdresser. In the Western narrative of celebrity, the star burns for fame,
works for it, dreams of it. Cheung, by contrast, was discovered on the street
while visiting Hong Kong with her mother, then anointed the traditional Hong
Kong way, through a beauty contest. Her fame seems disposable to her, even
baffling. A kind of respectful acclaim, the kind musicians and authors and
artists enjoy, would suit her better. It is not surprising to learn that
Hollywood's more arbitrary systems are totally alien to her: for example, the
dance of an agent soliciting scripts that his celebrity client will never get
around to reading. Even something as basic as the audition is unfamiliar
terrain. In Hong Kong, she has been handed every role she has played since she
was 18.
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