Leslie Cheung

Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing was born on September 12, 1956 in British Hong Kong, the youngest of ten children in a large and often distant household ^[1]. His father, Cheung Wut-hoi, worked as a tailor whose clientele included Western film figures passing through the colony, an early if indirect link between the family and the movie business ^[2]. By his own later accounts the home offered little warmth, and much of his childhood care fell to a family amah rather than his parents.

As a teenager he was sent abroad to study in England, eventually enrolling at the University of Leeds to read textile management, a subject chosen with the family trade in mind ^[2]. His studies ended before graduation when his father fell seriously ill, and he returned to Hong Kong in the mid 1970s without a degree or a settled plan. The city he came back to was in the middle of an entertainment boom, with television stations competing fiercely for young talent, and that environment soon pulled him toward performing.

Cheung's entry into show business came through a televised talent competition. In 1977 he entered the Asian Music Contest organized by the broadcaster then known as Rediffusion Television, singing in English, and finished as runner-up ^[1]. The result earned him a contract, small acting parts, and a recording career, but success did not follow quickly. His early albums sold poorly, and audiences at some live appearances were openly hostile, a period he later described as the hardest stretch of his working life ^[2].

The turn came after he moved to Capital Artists in the early 1980s. The 1983 song The Wind Blows On gave him his first genuine hit, and in 1984 the dance track Monica became one of the defining Cantopop records of the decade, transforming him into a headline act ^[3]. Through the middle of the 1980s he and fellow singer Alan Tam stood at the center of a famous chart rivalry whose partisan fan camps became a story in themselves, an episode still cited in histories of Hong Kong popular music ^[3].

His film career grew alongside the music. John Woo's 1986 crime drama A Better Tomorrow cast him as an idealistic young policeman opposite Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung, and the film's enormous box office success made it a template for the Hong Kong action cinema that followed ^[4]. A year later the supernatural romance A Chinese Ghost Story confirmed that he could carry a picture as a romantic lead ^[4].

Any account of Leslie Cheung achievements has to move between two parallel careers. As a singer he filled the Hong Kong Coliseum for extended concert runs during the late 1980s, and when he announced his retirement from pop music in 1989 he closed with a farewell series of thirty-three shows at that venue, an emotional send-off covered heavily by the local press ^[3]. He wrote or co-wrote a number of his own songs, and after returning to recording in 1995 with the album Beloved he kept composing until the end of his life ^[1].

His screen work reached even further. Stanley Kwan's 1988 ghost romance Rouge, opposite Anita Mui, remains one of the most admired Hong Kong films of its era ^[5]. In Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (1990) he played the restless drifter Yuddy, a performance that won him the Best Actor prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards ^[5]. Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), in which Cheung played the Peking opera performer Cheng Dieyi across half a century of Chinese history, shared the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the first Chinese-language film to take the top prize there ^[4]. Four years later he starred with Tony Leung Chiu-wai in Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together, a drama about two men from Hong Kong adrift in Buenos Aires that brought Wong the Best Director award at Cannes ^[4].

Cheung also worked behind the camera and the microphone in his later years, directing music videos, serving in creative roles on his concert productions, and directing the short film From Ashes to Ashes in 2000 ^[1]. Across his career he recorded dozens of albums in Cantonese and Mandarin and appeared in more than fifty films, a body of work that few Hong Kong performers of any generation have matched ^[2].

For most of his career Cheung guarded his private life, but in 1997, during a concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, he dedicated a love song to two people: his mother and his longtime companion Daffy Tong Hok-tak, a banker he had known since childhood ^[6]. The gesture was widely read as a public acknowledgment of their relationship, and it made him one of the very few top-tier East Asian stars of the period to be open about loving a man. He later described himself in interviews as bisexual ^[6].

After his 1989 retirement from music he emigrated to Canada, settling in Vancouver, and he acquired Canadian citizenship during those years abroad ^[1]. The quiet life did not hold him for long; film offers kept arriving, and by the mid 1990s he had returned to Hong Kong and to recording. On stage he grew steadily bolder. His Passion Tour of 2000 and 2001, with androgynous costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, drew admiration abroad and sharp mockery from parts of the Hong Kong tabloid press, criticism that friends said wounded him deeply ^[7].

In his final years Cheung remained in demand as an actor, appearing in the psychological thriller Inner Senses in 2002 while developing plans to direct a full-length feature ^[7]. Behind the public schedule he was struggling with severe clinical depression, an illness his family later confirmed and discussed publicly in the hope of reducing stigma around the condition ^[7].

On the evening of April 1, 2003, Cheung died after falling from an upper floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in central Hong Kong. He was 46. Police recovered a note, and his death was determined to be a suicide ^[6]. The news broke in a city already under strain from the SARS outbreak, and the shock was immense: fans gathered outside the hotel for days, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets for his funeral in April 2003 ^[6]. Newspapers across Asia treated his death as the loss of a defining figure of Hong Kong's cultural golden age ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Leslie Cheung will find the answer split productively between music and film, and between artistry and social meaning. Within Cantopop he is remembered as one of the singers who defined the genre's peak decade, and his recordings continue to sell and stream long after his death ^[3]. In cinema, his performances for Wong Kar-wai, Chen Kaige, Stanley Kwan, and John Woo are fixtures of retrospectives and critical surveys of Hong Kong and Chinese film ^[5].

His openness about his sexuality, along with roles such as Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine and Ho Po-wing in Happy Together, made him an icon for LGBTQ communities in Hong Kong and beyond, a status scholars of Chinese popular culture have examined at length ^[5]. In 2005 the readers and viewers of CNN ranked him among the favorite actors in the history of cinema in one of the network's audience polls, an indication of how far his reputation traveled ^[2].

Each year on April 1, admirers gather near the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong to leave flowers and cards, and fan organizations across Asia hold memorial concerts and screenings ^[6]. Two decades after his death, any serious Leslie Cheung biography must reckon with a career that changed what a Chinese pop star could sing, wear, play, and publicly be.