Leslie Cheung, Actor--From Hong Kong to the World-Part 1
Part 1
--You have many different looks.
--What type do you prefer?
--I like them all. I like them either separately or together. Which is the real one?
This dialog, between Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in “Rouge”, is a perfect descrīption of Leslie’s hypnotic appeal as an actor. He was so many different things in over 40 films. He was those things separately and sometimes all mixed up together. We were always left wondering where, inside of these myriad characters, was the seed of the real Leslie Cheung.
His earliest films, dating from the early to mid-80s, banked on his teen idol good-looks. But in the right role, and with sympathetic direction, we catch sight of a mesmerizing screen presence as early as 1980, in his first serious role in the teen drama “On Trial”. Leslie was only 23 at the time, didn’t have much experience as an actor and therefore didn’t command a lot of technique. But what he did have was a cocky confidence in