(2 of 3)
Then again, Leslie's life was.
HOW KWOK-WING BECAME LESLIE
Cheung Kwok-wing was born September 12, 1956, in Hong Kong. "I'm one of ten children," he told TIME's Stephen Short in early 2001. "I'm the youngest and the loneliest. The one closest to me is eight years older. My brothers would be dating girls and I was left alone in the corner, playing G.I. Joe or with my Barbie Doll. I never lived with my father for one single day, never. My father used to beat my mother up. It was terrible. And I always used to think, 'This what they call marriage.'"
Cheung pre was tailor to the stars: William Holden, Alfred Hitchcock. "My Dad had a fortune. We're from Canton province and at one point we were the largest landowners in the province. My grandfather got killed during the Cultural Revolution because he owned too much land." Leslie said that he helped support most of his six surviving siblings. "I'm a blessing. Aside from my elder sister, who is very well-educated and doing OK, my brothers and sisters aren't doing very well, so I do help them out sometimes. But I've no regrets. Blood is thicker than water." He enunciates the first principle of control through charity: "It's better to help somebody than have somebody help you."
At 11, Kwok-wing took math and verbal exams to get into secondary school. "I failed the regulations. I won awards for prose readings and music festivals but not the maths. My father called me up and asked if I wanted to study abroad. I thought it would liberate me. My situation had been miserable to that point. So I got on the plane and went to the Norwich School [in Norfolk, England]." At Norwich, Kwok-hing had to make a lot of readjustments. "There were racial problems, discrimination. But it still enabled me to see more things. I could take a train to London. So I didn't feel lonely. During weekends I used to go to Southend-on-Sea to see my relatives; they ran a restaurant there, so I was a bartender. I'd start doing performances. I was only 13 years old, but I'd do amateur singing every weekend." By this time he had chosen his English name. "I love the film Gone with the Wind. And I like Leslie Howard. The name can be a man's or woman's, it's very unisex, so I like it. It's rare in Hong Kong, too." There are 300 Cheungs listed in the Hong Kong Movie Database, but only one Leslie. As it should be.
After a year studying textile management at the University of Leeds, he returned to Hong Kong and placed second (singing American Pie) in ATV's Asian Music Contest. He was an immediate pop star, and stayed at the top for a quarter century. In the late 70s, as now, pop singers were encouraged to do movies, and at 21 Leslie made his film debut in a cheapo production, Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber, which was notable only for the first unveiling of his silky derriere (later almost a trademark). He appeared in a few TV dramas, including The Wu Lin Family, with a teenage Maggie Cheung. But the small screen couldn't contain his smoldering appeal. Leslie had a thing or two to teach Hong Kong about movie masculinity.
MOVIE LESLIE
Here was a new kind of star: beautiful, tender, toxic. James Dean with a mean streak, or a deeper Johnny Depp. At first he exploited his luscious youthfulness. In A Better Tomorrow he was tough Ti Lung's soft younger siblingessentially a kid sisterso infuriated by righteousness that he seems in a perpetual girlish snit. (No matter that Cheung turned 30 the month after the movie came out.) In his next hit, A Chinese Ghost Story, he was again the naif, getting tossed around by a 1,000-year-old tree demon with a giant yucky tongue and happily bossed around by the spectral Joey Wong.
He showed terrific versatility, at ease in art films (Farewell My Concubine, his fullest, bravest performance), action thrillers (A Better Tomorrow), fantasies (The Bride With White Hair), dark romances (The Phantom Lover) and fluffy comedies (as the music mogul who falls in love with a girl he thinks is a guy in He's a Woman, She's a Man). He could play soufle-light (the chef in The Chinese Feast) or psycho-dark (the killer in Double Tap).
Inside these varied characters was the irreducible, enigmatic "Leslie": a beautiful man whose sexuality is a gift or a plague to those who fall under his spell. They loved him and he left them; he must have said, "I don't love you" more times than anyone else in movies. He often played slick Ah Fei (shiftless youth) types; he could be daringly uningratiating, playing rotters and not caring what people thought. Seeming not to care, he got audiences to care. Women loved the on-screen Leslie because he came on sexy, forbidding, dominant, dangerous, easily bored or annoyed. Then, when he embraced you, you felt the simmering sky had cracked open, and Thor smiled.
Beyond attitude, this star was an actor. Leslie didn't simply mesmerize or bully the camera; he worked subtle wonders before it. He glamorized a scene in Days of Being Wild just by appraising himself in a full-length mirror while doing an expert cha-cha. Or, in unforgiving closeup, without moving a muscle, he could somehow change emotional temperature. You could see feelings rise in him like a blush or a bruise.
It was Wong Kar-wai who illuminated the inner Leslie on the big screen. Days of Being Wild made him a pouty brute whose mistreating of women is his payback to the mother who deserted him; it won Cheung a Hong Kong Film Award for best actor. In Ashes of Time, cast as a martial-arts scoundrel, he ably anchored a film of top Chinese stars and rapturous visual splendor. In the not-so-gay drama Happy Together he taught Tony Leung Chiu-wai how an actor prepares.
The film opens with a stark scene of the two main characters having sex. "When we tried to shoot the love scene it really shocked Tony," Cheung recalls. "He refused to do it. For two days he was miserable, lying on his bed. So I went up to him and said, 'Look at me, Tony, I've gone through so many scenes kissing, touching girls, grabbing breasts, do you think I really enjoyed it? Just treat it as a job, a normal love scene. I'm not going to fall in love with you, and I don't want you to really have sex with me. You're not my type.' So he agreed to do the scene."
FIVE TIMES LESLIE
My wife Mary and I spent serious time with LeslieI should say, he granted us an audiencefive times over five years in five far-flung cities: Suzhou, Atlantic City, New York, Hong Kong and Las Vegas. Each encounter gave us a tantalizing glimpse of uncut celebrity magnetism. He flirted (with Mary) and flared (at the mention of other Chinese stars). He was at ease with his often dogmatic petulance, unburdened by the world's acknowledgment of his luster. Leslie didn't manufacture star quality, or trouble much about radiating it. He was star quality. He embodied more charisma, more purring sexuality, more danger and need, than any Hong Kong or Hollywood actor I've met.
We first met Leslie on a four-day visit to the Suzhou, China, set of Temptress Moon, his reunion with the director, producer and female lead of Farewell My Concubine: Chen Kaige, Hsu Feng and Gong Li. Leslie was no prima donna, at least with us. Gracious, witty, instantly intimate with two strangers from halfway across the world, he gabbed and gossiped in high spirits and style. Then, just before a scene was about to be shot, he would retreat a bit, curl himself into his character and take his place on the set. I remember a scene that required him to burst through a door, cast an eye on some domestic mischief and escalate into high dudgeon. He did it perfectly, and at the end bowed to the crew's applause. "One Take Leslie!" he announced proudlythe honorific of a gifted professional.