Maggie Cheung: Why the Asian star is turning her back on film

I'm at the Edinburgh Filmhouse to meet one of the stars of world cinema. As a chill spring wind filters through a window, Maggie Cheung wafts in, looking so slight and delicate I fear she might be blown over in the breeze, but she strides to the sash window and lifts it wide open with surprising ease. The Chinese superstar smiles and shakes hands, takes cigarettes from her jeans, sits by the window, and asks if it's OK to smoke.

"I've tried to give up but it's very difficult," she says, blowing smoke out into the rain. In a smoking-free Scotland, she is breaking the law. But who could deny an illicit cigarette to an icon?

In a 25-year-career, the multi-award-winning actress has been the muse to some of China's greatest directors, including Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou, Wayne Wang and Stanley Kwan. Moving effortlessly between commercial and art-house, Cheung has dazzled Asian and European audiences with a poise and elegance reminiscent of a movie star from a bygone age.

In the Scottish capital for the launch of the first Cinema China festival - a celebration of 80 years of Chinese cinema, touring the UK this month - she is to introduce Centre Stage (1992), the festival's opening film, in which she plays Ruan Ling-yu, the 1930s Chinese screen goddess who was destroyed by fame.

Cheung, 43, is a luminous presence, her features dominated by razor-sharp cheekbones and wide, dark eyes. On screen, she exudes a mix of enigmatic beauty, cool melancholy and torment. But she is warm and relaxed in person, ready to talk about a life she is preparing to leave behind.

After 90 or so films, Cheung is, she says, moving away from cinema. "I don't want it to be the only thing I've done in my life. I'd like to paint and compose music, which means everything to me. I have to have music from the moment I wake up. My goal is to edit and score films. Maybe I'll discover I'm not talented that way, but I want to try. And I want to travel more."

She has homes in London, Hong Kong and Paris, where she lived with her former husband, the French writer-director Olivier Assayas, who directed her in Clean, about a rock junkie trying to kick her habit. It was a multilingual role in which she made a creditable go of singing songs composed by David Roback of the US band Mazzy Star. It was made during the amicable break-up of her marriage - the couple famously signed divorce papers on set - and the role, which would win her best actress at Cannes in 2004, would in effect become her last. "I know this sounds awful, but since I won in Cannes, I feel fulfilled as an actress," says Cheung. "I don't have any dreams of winning an Oscar. I don't have those goals any more."

This will come as a shock to fans, for whom she was the face of a new wave of Asian film. Cheung came to the notice of Western audiences when she played the leather-clad heroine of Assayas's Irma Vep in 1996, and shot to world fame in Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), mesmerising audiences as an elegant but discarded wife who finds solace with Tony Leung's similarly betrayed husband.

"Making In the Mood for Love was difficult because I had just got married," she says. "I told Olivier I would be away for three months, but I was away for 15. And Wong wouldn't let me go home. That's a lot of time to give to one project. But it wasn't really a factor in our separation. Things had changed anyway. And we are still friends."

Two years later, Cheung cemented her global profile as a gravity-defying swordswoman in Zhang Yimou's astounding martial arts epic Hero, the first Chinese-language film to top the US box office. Cheung became known for portraying implacable, tragic heroines. "But these roles can take their toll. I never took a break from filming for years," she says. "That can be damaging when you're working so much with your emotions and feelings. It can spill into your life."

Born in 1964 in Hong Kong, Cheung moved to Kent with her family at the age of eight. "My father was setting up a business in London but he fell in love with the English countryside," she says. The family settled in Bromley, and Cheung went to a local school, where she encountered much xenophobia and some cruelty. It was, she says, a very alienating period. "I became very defensive about myself and my culture. That has stayed with me. I'm offered a lot of films full of clichéd Chinese characters, which I won't accept. That's why I turn down a lot of offers [including a Bond and X-Men] from Hollywood. I feel I would be cheating my people and my culture."

Her parents divorced when she was 17, and Cheung returned with her mother to Hong Kong, where she fell into acting after coming second in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant. But her extraordinary flowering into a world star seems not have been planned.

Her screen debut was as Jackie Chan's girlfriend in Police Story (1985), and she made another two in the series, alongside other "pretty girl" roles in Hong Kong action films. But her first "real acting job" was in Wong Kar Wai's 1988 debut, As Tears Go By. It was the beginning of a long association with the director.

"I realised what acting could be," she says. "It was about exploring what was going on inside you emotionally. Wong gave me a completely different direction as an actress."

Is Cheung really ready to abandon such a career? She concedes that she may consider another project, but only if it is a comedy. "I've done too many sad victim roles," she says. "You can experience a lot of pain playing these parts. Outside cinema, I have my own problems, as we all do, and to carry the emotions of, say, a girl who is about to commit suicide gets heavy. Now I want to enjoy life, leave the sadness behind. I'm ready to change. Life is about timing and I've always had good timing."

Cinema China 07 visits London, Cambridge, Bristol and Manchester (www.cinemachina.org.uk)

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