Leslie Cheung

Leslie Cheung: The Voice and Face of a City's Golden Age

At a 1997 concert at Hong Kong Coliseum, Leslie Cheung sang "The Moon Represents My Heart" and dedicated it, in front of thousands, to his mother and to Daffy Tong — a man. It was one of the first times a major Chinese-language star had effectively come out in public. When he died, jumping from the twenty-fourth floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel on April 1, 2003, tens of thousands defied SARS travel warnings to attend his memorial.

The Youngest of Ten

Cheung Kwok-wing was born September 12, 1956, in Kowloon, British Hong Kong, the youngest of ten children in a middle-class Hakka family. His father, Cheung Wut-hoi, was a celebrated tailor whose clients included Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, and Cary Grant, but Cheung described feeling emotionally distant from him; he later said his childhood held "nothing worth remembering" apart from his close bond with his grandmother, whose death hit him hard in primary school. After secondary school at Rosaryhill in Hong Kong, he was sent at age twelve to Eccles Hall School near Norwich, England, where he struggled academically but excelled in English and fell in love with Western film and music. He chose the English name "Leslie" after actor Leslie Howard, liking that it could belong to a man or a woman. He went on to study textile management at the University of Leeds but abandoned the degree in 1976 when his father suffered a stroke, returning to Hong Kong to work, briefly, as a Levi's salesman.

An Unpromising Start

His entertainment career began in May 1977, when he entered RTV's Asian Singing Contest and finished as Hong Kong division runner-up singing "American Pie," earning a three-year RTV contract and a deal with Polydor Records. It did not go well at first: his early recordings sold poorly and critics disparaged his voice — a period he later called "full of despair and obstacles."

The turn came after he signed with Capital Artists in 1982. A cover single, "The Wind Blows On," revived his commercial prospects, and 1984's dance track "Monica" became a chart-topping hit that pulled Cantopop away from its traditional sentimental ballads. A run of platinum records followed through the decade, including Summer Romance (1987), which sold more than 350,000 copies and became the year's best-selling Cantopop release, cementing him as the genre's "undisputed royalty." He announced a "retirement" from music in 1989, capped by a sold-out 33-date farewell run at the Hong Kong Coliseum, before emigrating to Vancouver.

From Cantopop to Cannes

Cheung had begun acting in 1978 and spent years in minor teen roles before a 1983 Best Actor nomination for Nomad signaled real range. His pan-Asian film breakthrough came through director John Woo, who cast him in A Better Tomorrow (1986) as a young police officer torn between duty and his criminal brother, a role that, alongside A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), made him a star across South Korea and Japan as well as Hong Kong. His screen partnership with singer-actress Anita Mui, beginning with Rouge (1988), became legendary; one scholar described their chemistry as an "unprecedented" mutual "mystic power of charisma."

Cheung's international reputation was built on collaborations with two of Chinese cinema's most acclaimed directors. He won Best Actor at the 1991 Hong Kong Film Awards for Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, then achieved global recognition playing a cross-dressing Peking opera performer in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) — the first Chinese-language film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. According to the director and screenwriter, Cheung narrowly missed the festival's Best Actor prize because a jury member reportedly mistook him for a woman and voted for him as Best Actress instead. He followed with Cannes-linked roles in Temptress Moon (1996) and Wong's Happy Together (1997), and sat on the jury of the 1998 Berlin International Film Festival. Across a 26-year career he appeared in 56 films and released more than 40 albums; in 2010 CNN listed him among the 25 Greatest Asian Actors of All Time.

Coming Out in Public

Cheung's 1995 return to music, after signing with Rock Records, brought both commercial success and a new artistic candor: beginning with the 1996 album Red, his work grew more self-reflective and openly androgynous. His 1999 song "Left and Right Hand" and his 2000 track "I" were widely read as addressing his own sexuality directly. In a 1992 interview he had already said, "My mind is bisexual. It's easy for me to love a woman. It's also easy for me to love a man, too," adding that he believed "a good actor would be androgynous." His relationship with Daffy Tong Hok-tak, his mother's godson, became public at that 1997 concert dedication, making Cheung one of the first major Chinese-language performers effectively to come out. In 2001, his gender-crossing Passion Tour with designer Jean Paul Gaultier broke attendance records across Asia — including sixteen consecutive sold-out concerts in Japan — even as it drew hostile press coverage in Hong Kong that Cheung and his agent later blamed, in part, for his subsequent depression.

Illness and Death

Cheung's sister Ophelia later revealed he had been diagnosed with clinical depression caused by "a chemical imbalance in the brain," and that media intrusion made ordinary treatment difficult — he would see his psychiatrist at his sister's home rather than risk being photographed at a clinic. His partner, Daffy Tong, later confirmed Cheung had attempted suicide once before, in November 2002. On April 1, 2003, Cheung died by suicide, jumping from the twenty-fourth floor of Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental hotel; his note read, in part, "Depression! Many thanks to all my friends... This year has been so tough. I can't stand it anymore... In my life I have done nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?" Despite the SARS epidemic and international travel warnings against visiting Hong Kong, tens of thousands attended his memorial and funeral, with directors Tsui Hark and Stanley Kwan among the pallbearers.

Why Leslie Is Called a Genius

Cheung's claim to the word rests less on a single discovery than on an unusually complete artistic range across two demanding fields at once: he was simultaneously one of Cantopop's defining vocal stars and an actor whose performances in Farewell My Concubine and Happy Together are still cited among Chinese-language cinema's finest. Scholar Douglas Parkes has written that "Cheung's importance to the cultural memory of contemporary Hong Kong cannot be overstated," arguing that his career trajectory paralleled the city's own rise, while Chinese University of Hong Kong professor Anthony Fung observed that "after so many years, we hardly find any new icons, new superstars who could reach that level of importance." That is a case for genius as total artistic and cultural synthesis — voice, screen presence, and a willingness to use his own public identity as material — rather than for a single technical innovation.

The honest counter is that Cheung himself began as a poorly reviewed, commercially unsuccessful singer whose early performances were mocked by critics; his eventual mastery was built through years of unglamorous persistence rather than innate, fully formed brilliance, and his most celebrated screen performances were shaped substantially by directors of extraordinary skill — Chen Kaige and Wong Kar-wai — whose vision he served as much as authored.

Legacy

Cheung is remembered as a founding figure of modern Cantopop and a pioneering LGBTQ+ icon across the Chinese-speaking world; in 2013 he became the first contemporary celebrity entered into Cihai, China's major encyclopedia, and fans marked his birthday that year by folding nearly two million origami cranes in tribute. Memorial concerts, held roughly every five years since 2003, continue to draw fans who never saw him perform live.

Achievements

• Notable work: In the Sentimental Past
• Educated at University of Leeds, Norwich School and Rosaryhill School
• Worked as singer, composer and film director