Leslie cheung

Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing (張國榮) (Hong Kong, September 12, 1956 – Ibid. April 1, 2003) was a Canadian-born Hong Kong actor and singer.

Biography

He was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, the youngest of ten children in a middle-class family. His father was a renowned tailor, who worked for show business people like William Holden and Cary Grant.

Cheung began acting and singing in 1978, but would not become famous until 1987 when John Woo cast him in the film A Better Tomorrow. Later he would work for Chen Kaige in Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon and finally with Wong Kar-wai in Happy Together, The Ashes of Time and The True Story of Ah Fei. He is also known for participating in A Chinese Ghost Story.

Together with Bruce Lee, Leslie gave Hong Kong its true nature and evolution in world cinema. Although at one point in his life, he had terrible performances in Kung Fu movies, he was still the center of great film achievements.

Of humble origins, he sought out stages in pop music, the last years of his life being the most prosperous in ballads, with great success. He was also a very transgressive character throughout his life, especially because of his bisexuality that became more evident after the movie Farewell to my concubine (1993). In that portrayal of the character, characterized by being a member of Chinese opera since he was a boy, he suffered a lot during his training as the actor of King Chu's concubine for the rest of China's political history, during the 20th century. Cheung was one of the few Hong Kong artists who dared to play LGBT characters on the big screen in the 1990s.

In 1990, he moved to Vancouver and became a Canadian citizen.

He was generally quite reserved about his private life. In 1997, Cheung went public with his relationship with Daffy Tong Hok-Tak during a concert, who was his partner until Cheung's death and was recognized in an obituary as his surviving spouse.

In 2001 he claimed during an interview with Time magazine: "It is more appropriate to say that I am bisexual. I have had girlfriends. When I was 22 or so years old, I asked my girlfriend Teresa Mo to marry me." making him the only Hong Kong artist to have admitted to being bisexual to the media. His proposal to Teresa Mo was not reciprocated.

He committed suicide in 2003 by jumping from the 24th floor of the prestigious Mandarin Oriental Hotel located in the central district of Hong Kong Island, shocking Chinese society. The day after his suicide, his childhood friend and fellow boyfriend, Daffy Tong, confirmed that Cheung suffered from clinical depression and had been seeing psychiatrists for treatment for nearly a year, following his first suicide attempt in 2002.