Leslie Cheung

Pop singer and star of 'Farewell My Concubine'

Cheung Kwok-Wing (Leslie Cheung), actor and singer: born Hong Kong 12 September 1956; died Hong Kong 1 April 2003.

"Narcissistic? Absolutely! I have some quality which is unique, something the audience identifies with. Maybe it's a kind of sensitivity, especially in affairs of the heart. Something soft."

Leslie Cheung discussed his own androgynous appeal in the British Film Institute/Channel 4 documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, made in 1996 for the "Century of Cinema" project by the gay director Stanley Kwan. Cheung's roles in several of the most internationally acclaimed Chinese movies of the last 20 years made him one of the most widely recognised Chinese actors of his generation, although he never reached the level of global stardom attained by his action-star contemporaries Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

Born in Hong Kong in 1956 and schooled in England, he entered showbiz after coming runner-up in a singing contest in 1980. He trained as an actor at the Hong Kong television station RTV (nowadays known as ATV) and began appearing in its drama series, and he released his first LP, The Wind Blows On, in 1981.

His boyish charm and faintly louche persona led the "new wave" director Patrick Tam to cast him as a mother-fixated golden boy in his film Nomad the following year; Cheung made his big-screen début wearing only his underpants, playing with himself while talking to his mother on the phone. The film ran into a censorship furore in Hong Kong and had to be re-edited and partially reshot before it could be released – Cheung was obliged to retake his first scene, this time wearing trousers.

This marked the start of a decade of local superstardom, shuttling between hit albums, stadium-sized concerts and movies. Three very different film roles brought him to international attention. In John Woo's hyperbolic gangster melodrama A Better Tomorrow (1986), he is less than plausibly cast as a macho cop.

In Stanley Kwan's sumptuous Rouge (1988) he more believably plays a 1930s opium addict who chickens out of a suicide pact with a beloved courtesan. And in Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild (1990) his innate narcissism is given an edge of sadism in the role of a 1960s playboy who seduces and abandons a string of women, apparently in revenge for the way his mother abandoned him. Soon after he completed Wong's film, Cheung announced his retirement as a singer and resettled in Vancouver.

Less frequent but increasingly ambitious film roles followed, including two more memorable parts for Wong Kar-Wai. In the martial arts fantasia Ashes of Time (1994) he is the jaded swordsman Ouyang Feng, known as "Malicious West", who brokers contract killings for hapless clients from a shack in a desert. In the Cannes prizewinning Happy Together (1997) he plays his first explicitly gay role as a good-time boy who breaks up violently with his lover (Tony Leung) while visiting Argentina.

By that time he had also starred in two films for the Mainland Chinese director Chen Kaige. In Farewell My Concubine (1993), for which he spent months learning Peking Opera stagecraft, he plays an actor who specialises in female roles and yearns for his on-stage partnership with his leading man to be carried through into their life off-stage. In the somewhat botched Temptress Moon (1996) he plays a Shanghai gigolo looking for revenge on the aristocratic family that slighted him.

His suicide note has not yet been made public, but it allegedly thanks his long-term lover Tong, his early television mentor Lydia Shum and his psychiatrist, and explains that he had been feeling depressed. His death was characteristically florid: he jumped from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong to the street below.

Tony Rayns