A BEAUTY QUEEN WHO HAD TALENT TO MATCH
Anita Yuen won the HKFA best actress award twice but was not always fussy about her roles and had a reputation for being difficult on set
Viewed today, Hong Kong actress Anita Yuen Wing-yee’s portrayals of independent, forthright women in early 1990s films such as He’s a Woman, She’s a Man and C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri don’t seem that unusual.
But at the time, the way her characters spoke their minds and fearlessly tried to achieve what they wanted in life – and in love – struck a chord with young female viewers constrained by more conservative times.
Her career started out in a conventional way – she was crowned Miss Hong Kong in 1990, at the age of 18. This led to a contract with dominant terrestrial broadcaster TVB.
Yuen always seemed a little confused by her pageant win.
“I have never thought of myself as beautiful,” she told the Post in 1994.
Yuen had a small role as a model who is mistakenly thought to be a prostitute in her 1992 debut, The Days of Being Dumb, produced by Peter Chan Ho-sun, a filmmaker who would later become important in her success.
She impressed critics, and won the award for best new performer in the Hong Kong Film Awards (HKFA) for her efforts.
Yuen’s big break came later that year when she played the role of a terminal cancer patient determined to live life her way in Derek Yee Tung-sing’s classic tear-jerker C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri.
She won her first HKFA best actress award for her turn.
Yuen, like all other actresses in the 90s, was not very choosy about her roles after that; the aim was always to make as much money as possible while at the top.
But she did appear in a number of highly regarded contemporary-set films for Peter Chan, notably He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, in which she disguised herself as a boy.
She won her second HKFA best actress award for the role.
“The four films she made with Peter Chan during this period really made her, especially He’s a Woman, She’s a Man and its follow-up two years later, Who’s the Woman, Who’s the Man,” says Derek Elley, the critic who brought Chan’s work to international attention.
“Chan has always been a great director of actresses, and he seems to have responded to Yuen’s Audrey Hepburn-ish, gazellelike, nervous quality which especially fitted the cross-dressing theme of He’s a Woman.
“At the time, Yuen had an unaffected, natural quality which was very different from the more artificial style of many other Hong Kong actresses,” Elley says.
At the height of her success, Yuen garnered a reputation for being difficult to work with.
“Anita Yuen has a reputation of being loud, stubborn, and opinionated about most things – especially when they relate to her. And she knows it,” the Post said in 1998.
An incident during the filming of Jackie Chan’s Thunderbolt (1995), in which she reportedly left the set and flew home, even though Chan had requested that she stay an extra day for additional shooting, led to a long-running feud that was only resolved some 22 years later, when the two unexpectedly ran into each other at a dinner.
Peter Chan said he found her difficult to work with from the start. He was worried about casting Yuen in Tom, Dick and Hairy, as he felt she lacked the experience for the role, and things came to a head when she refused to wear a bra when in character.
Chan felt that this showed she misunderstood the character she was playing.
“We were on the verge of replacing her, until we put her in front of the camera on the first day of shooting, and it was like ‘Wow’!”, he told Miles Wood in 1998. “That was when I really fell in love with her as an actress.”
“It’s not easy working with her, as she was spoiled rotten. It’s a love/hate relationship. Sometimes I can’t stand working with her on set; she just can’t control herself. But every time I do casting, I think of her, as she’s so good,” Chan told Wood.
Yuen did address this issue in an interview with the Post’s Winnie Chung in 1998.
“I’ve asked Peter [Chan] what kind of person I was when I was a newcomer, and he said I was a busybody but I always knew what I was doing. A lot of newcomers don’t seem to know what they are doing,” she said.
After the successes of the early 90s, Yuen did not seem to know where to take her career. Like many Hong Kong actresses she tried singing, and recorded a Mandopop album in Taiwan.
Sometimes I can’t stand working with her on set; she just can’t control herself
FILMMAKER PETER CHAN ON HIS ‘LOVE/ HATE RELATIONSHIP’ WITH ANITA YUEN IN 1998
She was not pleased with the result, which did not sell well.
Competition from Hollywood meant that fewer films were being made in the second half of the 90s. Yuen decided she needed a change of image to keep up with the times.
“I can’t make any more films like C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri, as I’ve become more mature as a woman,” she told the Post. “I look and feel completely different about things, and I’ve become more mature. I couldn’t do that again, so I have to look at other options.”
“I’m not ready to quit, as I still love acting, But I just don’t want roles that require me to skip around and look cute, or have that wide-eyed cute look – not unless I’m playing an idiot. That would make me throw up watching myself on the screen,” she said.
Although she never again hit the heights of her earlier on-screen outings, Yuen’s acting talent continued to be recognised by the industry and viewers alike, and she has kept working throughout the 2000s.
She was most recently seen in a pair of 2019 films, the social satire A Home with a View and the anti-corruption drama Integrity. Yuen will next be seen starring opposite Chow Yun-fat in One More Chance, a nostalgic drama previously known as Be Water, My Friend, and Don’t Call Me God of Gamblers, which is expected to be released on the mainland in June.
In this regular series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.