20 December 1997 AUSTRALIA: Out of the Chinese box / Public Eye.

By Lynden Barber.

THE Maggie Cheung who walks into the room is hardly recognisable as the round-faced goddess familiar from her movies. She is still a striking beauty - but my god, the weight loss! Already small-boned, her clothes now hang baggily around her.

In mainland China and her home town, Hong Kong, Cheung is a big film star when asked how her fame compares with that of the revered Gong Li, with whom she co-stars in Wayne Wang's forthcoming Chinese Box, she "can't say who is popular or who is more famous". Yet, despite a mammoth 70 films to her credit, Cheung's name is still not well known in the West. That seems to be changing, however, thanks to her first non-Chinese film, Irma Vep, in which she plays a Hong Kong actor called Maggie Cheung arriving in France to star in a doomed remake of the silent film serial Les Vampires.

It's often not intended as flattery to say that actors are "playing themselves", but Cheung portrays a fictional version of herself with an easygoing charm that makes her performance one of the year's most memorable.

Written especially for her by French writer-director Olivier Assayas, the film is both a wonderfully freewheeling satire on the French film industry and a love poem to its star, who Assayas first met at a film festival. Whatever their professional distance initially, when they visited the Brisbane International Film Festival in August they were clearly an item. Cheung is rare in that she has crossed from the populist Hong Kong action-fantasy cinema into the world of the serious art film - and been accepted.

Two events - an accident requiring 17 stitches to her head on the set of a Jackie Chan movie and a particularly gruelling shoot for the 1993 fantasy Green Snake - led Cheung to rethink her exhausting workload, in which she played up to 12 roles a year. The result was a two-year sabbatical.

"I just knew I needed to stop, to find myself," she explains. "Apart from being on film sets from 1984 to 1994, I didn't have a life. I would travel to be on location to do films, but I would never really see the country.

"I wouldn't call that travelling. So I needed time to really see the world and at least know what I like and what I don't like. Because if you were to ask me what kind of books do you like to read, [the reply would be] `I don't know, because I haven't read much'."

She describes the head injury she sustained in a mistimed stunt, when a metal bed frame fell on her, as "something that will stay with me forever. When you get hurt you have to suffer it and no one can help you. They can give you the sympathy but they can't help you through the illness. It was quite hard."

Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) has enjoyed a successful season in Melbourne and opened in Sydney on Thursday, with other States to follow. Cheung plays the calm eye of a storm of personal agendas and neuroses, including those of an angst-ridden director played by Jean-Pierre Leaud in an echo of his role in Francois Truffaut's Day for Night.

As local audiences for foreign language films decline, the fact that much of Vep is in English hardly hinders its chances. Cheung's command of the language should be no surprise. Born in Hong Kong in 1964, she moved to Britain at the age of eight and at 17 moved back to her birthplace, where she modelled and later won fame by appearing in scores of popular comedies, fantasies and action flicks.

A shift into a more rarefied atmosphere occurred when serious Hong Kong directors such as the hip Wong Kar-Wai, the visual aesthete Stanley Kwan and the now Australian-based Clara Law saw something beyond the athleticism and good looks and cast her in their films.

Two years after appearing in Wong's Days of Being Wild, a "landmark in new Chinese cinema" according to British magazine Sight & Sound, Cheung won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin film festival for her impersonation of the Chinese silent screen legend Ruan Ling Yu in Kwan's Centre Stage (released in Australia on the Chinatown video label).

Irma Vep is her first non-Chinese movie, something she admits she was initially shy about for fear the Hong Kong audience would bitch about her being ambitious to become known in the West. So have they? Perhaps, she smiles. "Because I'm not working with Tom Cruise. Maybe Hong Kong people would think, `You're big here, you should at least be working with Johnny Depp. Gosh, you're in that small independent film.' It means nothing to them.

"But to me, as an actress," she continues, "small independent films are much cosier and you can really work more than when you're surrounded by big Hollywood stars."

What would a big American studio want her for anyway, she wonders. "Something Joan Chen would turn down? It's not really my cup of tea. I'm not against any of those parts but I know it's not something I'd be dying to play in and I won't be that good in it."

(c) Nationwide News Proprietary Ltd, 1997.

Sources: AUSTRALIAN 20/12/97