Maggie Cheung’s best martial arts movie roles, from Hero with Jet Li and Tony Leung Chiu-wai to Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time

The In the Mood for Love actress appeared in several martial arts and action films in the 1990s, including Green Snake, her most overtly sensual role

She brings emotional weight to her role in Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time, and excels in combat scenes with Jet Li in Zhang Yimou’s period drama Hero

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(From left) Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui in a still from The Heroic Trio (1993). Cheung has appeared in a variety of martial arts films despite having said that she has no interest in the genre.

Published: 7:15am, 26 Dec 2021

Before the international success of In the Mood for Love, foreign journalists referred to Maggie Cheung Man-yuk as an “action heroine”. That used to confuse people in Hong Kong, as the popular actress was more known at home for her comedies, light dramas and art-house films.

The description probably arose because Cheung had appeared in Jackie Chan films such as Police Story, in which she had a non-action role as his girlfriend. Cheung has said that, although she enjoyed making Chan’s films, they were not the kind of roles she was looking for.

“Jackie always gave you a lot of things to do,” she told television programme Cinema AZN in 2007, “but they weren’t things that I really wanted to do.”

Although Cheung has often said that she has no interest in the genre, she did appear in several martial arts/action films during the boom years of the early 1990s. The genre had become highly lucrative again, and performers were unable to resist the big salaries that were on offer.

She co-starred in Tsui Hark’s New Dragon Gate Inn, one of the best “wire-fu” films (that used wires and pulleys to augment actors’ martial arts skills), and even made a couple of films with lowbrow director/producer Wong Jing. Cheung also played a prototype superheroine in Johnnie To Kei-fung’s The Heroic Trio.