It's easier to just not ask
Why Isn't Maggie Cheung a Hollywood Star?
By SUSAN DOMINUSPublished: November 14, 2004
Cheung has been a fixture of Asian superstardom for 21 years and has won more acting awards in China than any other woman. She started out as Jackie Chan's long-suffering, slapsticky girlfriend, May, in the goofy action-oriented "Police Story" movies. (Chan said that when he first saw Cheung on Hong Kong TV, she struck him as someone who "wouldn't mind me kicking her down a flight of stairs.") Eventually tiring, as much physically as creatively, of action films, by the late 80's she had started working with the dreamy, painterly filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, trading her role as a plucky comic for more nuanced parts in films like "As Tears Go By" and "In the Mood for Love" -- women with a noirish unattainability or ingenues shedding their innocence. In the mid 90's, she crossed over to select Western audiences for the first time, working with the French director Olivier Assayas, whom she would eventually marry and who directed her recently in "Clean," the film for which she won the best actress award at Cannes. For Cheung's Asian audiences, it's as if they've watched her morph over the years from Audrey Hepburn to Greta Garbo.
So why is it that American audiences know Cheung only vaguely, if at all, as the woman who fended off a torrent of arrows in the Chinese film "Hero," which was a sleeper success in the United States this summer? It's somewhat mystifying that one of Asia's finest actresses is virtually unknown to Hollywood audiences, as if celebrity were the one export too fragile to make the 7,000-mile trip across the Pacific. Cheung's English, though accented, is fluent; her beauty, universal; her talent, unarguable -- the imprimatur of Cannes confirmed the cross-cultural appeal her Chinese fans have appreciated for decades. To wonder why Cheung isn't a Hollywood star is to wonder a bigger question: why hasn't any contemporary Asian actress become a major Hollywood star?
They've got a specific package to sell…American culture. That's all.
