Quotes of the Day

Was any actor as beautiful as Leslie Cheung? Did anyone bring to the gift of glamour the seductive insolence Leslie exuded? His first appearance in a film — his face soft and smooth, with lips that expertly puckered or pouted — had the impact of a struck match. The screen flared to life; suddenly there was heat, and the incense of sulfur. To see him as the hurtful teddy boy in Days of Being Wild, the proud warrior in The Bride with White Hair and the dominant demon romancer in Phantom Lover is to realize there's nothing more exhilarating than a trip to hell with him at the wheel.

Leslie (everyone from his co-workers to screaming fans called Cheung Kwok-wing by his English name) was gorgeous since his first TV appearance in a 1976 song contest. He matured in acting ability and the use of his smoldering charisma, but never seemed to age. "Guess how old he is," Hong Kong film folk would ask, then declare that Asia's perpetual bad boy was flirting with middle age — as suavely and as masterfully as he flirted with everything and everyone else. In his films, and in the spectacular concerts that had him crooning ballads one minute and flouncing in a Jean-Paul Gaultier gown the next, Leslie was the consummate tease. He performed a seven-veils dance for us, and we lost our heads to him.

He turned 46 last September, and he will forever stay that age. But he chose a drastic method of staving off wrinkles, a potbelly, the whims of a fickle public. Last Tuesday he scheduled a tea with his friend and former agent, Chan Suk-fan, at a favorite haunt, the Mandarin Oriental hotel. When he didn't show, Chan called Leslie, who was on the terrace of the hotel's 24th-floor gym. He said he'd meet her outside; he'd be right down. It was a final tease — a sick joke, really — for when Chan came out she found his body on the pavement. He had leapt to his death.

A fall from a great height: that befits a tragic hero or, in Leslie's case, a tragic diva. For if Brigitte Lin embodied the woman-man in such '90s films as Swordsman II and Ashes of Time, then Leslie was Asia's definitive man-woman. More persuasively so, because for Lin it was a role; for Leslie it was life. A gay man in a society intolerant of gays, he never explicitly acknowledged his homosexuality. But neither did he try to suppress it, as some Hong Kong stars have done. He was too much the showman, the exhibitionist, in his way the truth teller. He played the pining gay opera star in Farewell My Concubine, then Tony Leung Chiu-wai's caustic lover in Happy Together. Both movies were worldwide hits and gave him a notoriety that didn't quite do him justice. He was gay, yes, but he was mainly other: a luscious rebuttal to Hong Kong cinema's stern or strutting machismo.

He promenaded this otherness. It made him a star but obscured his talent. It is a gift to be beautiful; it is an art to know how to lend that beauty to a film character. An actor of commanding subtlety, Leslie rarely overstated an emotion because he knew what the camera saw: he knew the camera loved him.

What did his friends, fans and critics know? We know what it was like to see Leslie — to sense his charm, his pretty petulance and his danger — but not what it was like to be Leslie. He seemed so pleased in there, in the fairy-tale kingdom of Cheung, but he may have felt that his castle was crumbling, that his subjects were restless. (Tony Leung was landing the big roles Leslie wanted.) And perhaps the mirror told him he was no longer the fairest one of all.

The day after Leslie's death, his longtime lover, Daffy Tong Hok-tak, said that the star had tried killing himself with sleeping pills last November, and that he had been seriously depressed for 20 years. Twenty years! Back to the time of his first hit album; all through his reign as Canto-pop's top star and Hong Kong film's golden boy. If his eminence and allure could not make him happy, then he was a braver, more cunning artist than anyone suspected. Leslie Cheung danced before us, alluringly, and only let the seventh veil drop last week, revealing the desperate child beneath the diva's brilliant plumage.

• Richard Corliss
• Leslie Cheung — movie star and pop idol — took a last, fatal step into the dark