- Born
- Died
- Birth nameCheung Kwok Wing
- Nickname
- Gor-gor
- Height1.74 m
- Leslie Cheung was the youngest of 10 children. His father was tailor to the late William Holden. Leslie's parents divorced when he was young, and he claims this is one reason for his disinterest in marriage. Following graduation from secondary school, he studied at Leeds University in Great Britain. Upon his return to Hong Kong, he entered the 1976 ATV Asian Music Contest, where he took second prize. He went on to perform on stage, television and in teeny-bopper movies. It wasn't until he was cast in the role of "Kit" in John Woo's Le syndicat du crime (1986) that his acting career took off; he has since performed in some of the best-known Hong Kong movies of the last decade, working under the direction of such directors as Kaige Chen, Wong Kar-Wai, Hark Tsui and, of course, Woo. Leslie emigrated to Canada in 1992, but soon returned to Hong Kong, demonstrating his intention to remain past the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China through his purchase of real estate and opening of a coffee shop in the colony.
Leslie jumped from the landmark Mandarin Oriental hotel in the central business district early in the evening on 1st April 2003, leaving a suicide note that was found on the body.- IMDb mini biography by: Lori Hitchcock <lhitch@lib.bekkoame.or.jp>
- On April 1, 2003, he jumped to his death from the 24th floor of the famed Mandarin Oriental Hotel, located in the Central district of Hong Kong Island. He left a suicide note saying that he had been suffering from depression. The day after Leslie's death, his long time partner, Tong, confirmed that Cheung suffered from (clinical) depression and had been seeing psychiatrists for treatment for almost a year. He also revealed that Cheung had attempted suicide in 2002.
- Cheung was bisexual and claimed so in an interview with Time magazine. He had denied it during the earlier portion of his career but "came out" in the 1990s after emigrating to Vancouver, Canada. In a 1997 concert Cheung openly revealed his relationship with Daffy Tong Hok-Tak. He became the co-executor of Cheung's estate. A full-page obituary on Cheung in a Hong Kong newspaper listed Tong as his surviving spouse.
- In his early career chose his name "Leslie" after the British actor Leslie Howard and because of his love for the American film Autant en emporte le vent (1939). He liked the fact that the name Leslie could be either a male or female name.
- In the early 1990s he became one of the few Hong Kong actors who dared to play gay characters on-screen. Cheung's first gay role was Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine (1993). In Happy Together (1997), Cheung played another gay role which involved him in graphic sex scenes and for which he was nominated for the Best Actor Award at both the Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Awards.
- The first Hong Kong actor who acted in a mainland China film (Farewell My Concubine, 1992)
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