On the night of 1 April 2003, a man in a dark suit walked onto the terrace of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Central Hong Kong and stepped off. Within an hour, the city understood that Leslie Cheung — Gor Gor, big brother — was gone. The news hit like Typhoon Signal 10 making landfall at midday. Candlelight vigils formed outside the hotel for weeks. Twenty-three years later, people still leave flowers there on 1 April every year.
That he is still mourned so publicly, so stubbornly, says everything you need to know about why Leslie Cheung mattered. He was not just a Cantopop star. He was not just a film actor. He was the voice, the face and the quiet defiance of an entire Cantonese generation — and the first big public figure in the Chinese-speaking world to live openly as a gay man. If you only know his name, this one's for you.
The Kowloon tailor's youngest son
Cheung Fat-chung was born on 12 September 1956 in Kowloon, the youngest of ten children in a Hakka family. His father Cheung Wut-hoi was a tailor — not just any tailor, but one of Hong Kong's most sought-after, with a client list that reportedly included Alfred Hitchcock and Marlon Brando among other Western celebrities. The family lived with the kind of money that could send a child to boarding school in England but with the kind of distance that meant Leslie barely saw his father through most of his childhood.
At twelve, he was shipped off to Eccles Hall School near Norwich, then on to the University of Leeds to study textile management — the family trade. He never finished the degree. In 1976, his father had a stroke, and Leslie returned to Hong Kong to help. He never left again. The classier, Anglo-tilted screen name "Leslie" he kept from his English years, borrowed from Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind. The last name, the home, the Cantonese tongue — those were always Kowloon's.
The booed-off beginnings
If you came up on Leslie Cheung's untouchable 1990s, you will not believe how badly his early career went. In 1977 he placed second in Rediffusion Television's Asian Music Contest — a solid start. He signed with Polydor Records. The reviews ranged from tepid to cruel; one described his voice as "chicken-like." He was booed off stage during his 1977 debut performance. Polydor let him go.
For six years, he grafted — small TV roles, warm-up gigs, cover songs. He later said he kept going out of pure stubbornness, the Cantonese 唔忿氣 (m4 fan6 hei3) refusal to accept being written off. If you ever want to wear that particular feeling, there is a 硬頸 Hard Neck sweatshirt waiting with your name on it.
In 1982 he moved to Capital Artists. In 1984 came "Monica." The song — a Cantonese cover of Kōji Kikkawa's Japanese hit, built on a dance-pop tempo that pushed Cantopop beyond its ballad comfort zone — tore the industry open. Suddenly the kid everyone had written off was selling out the Hong Kong Coliseum.
🎤 Secret 1: He wrote his most famous love song for a man
In 1995, Leslie released the album Most Beloved (寵愛), which sold over 300,000 copies in Hong Kong alone. On it was a track called "Red" (紅) and another called "The Moon Represents My Heart." Years later, Leslie's longtime partner Daffy Tong Hok-tak confirmed that most of the album's love songs were secretly written for him, long before Leslie publicly came out. At the time, listeners thought the album was a love letter from a star to his adoring female fans. It was a love letter — just not the one anyone assumed.
🎬 Secret 2: He turned down Hollywood more than once
After Farewell My Concubine (1993) earned Cannes acclaim, Hollywood came knocking. Leslie turned the offers down. He reportedly disliked how little creative control Asian actors were given at the time, and preferred the chaos and immediacy of Hong Kong film sets — long shoots, improvised scripts, directors like Wong Kar-wai who would film for two years and reshoot the ending three times. He stayed in Cantonese cinema when he could have gone global, and the Cantonese film world will always love him for that choice.
💔 Secret 3: The 1997 concert where he came out, mid-song
On his 1996–97 "Red" concert tour at the Hong Kong Coliseum, Leslie sang "The Moon Represents My Heart" and dedicated it, in front of a stunned audience, to "my mother, and my friend Mr Tong." It was not a press release. It was not an interview in a glossy magazine. It was a quiet dedication from a stage, and it made him one of the first major public figures in the Chinese-speaking world to acknowledge a same-sex partner. Decades on, the clip still circulates on 1 April every year.
🎭 Secret 4: He studied Peking Opera for a year for one film
For Farewell My Concubine (1993), director Chen Kaige asked Leslie to play Cheng Dieyi — a male Peking Opera performer who spends his life playing female roles. Leslie trained extensively in traditional Peking Opera technique to prepare: the hand gestures, the walk, the falsetto, the elaborate make-up application. He went on to win Best Foreign Actor at the Japanese Academy Awards for the role, and the film shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year. He later said it was the hardest role of his life. It also became the one he was proudest of.
The films that made him
His filmography is a map of 1980s–90s Hong Kong cinema at its peak: A Better Tomorrow (1986) with John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. A Chinese Ghost Story (1987). Rouge (1988). Days of Being Wild (1990), which won him his first Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards and started his long creative marriage with Wong Kar-wai. Farewell My Concubine (1993). Ashes of Time (1994). And Happy Together (1997), the Buenos Aires-set love story opposite Tony Leung that gave the Cantonese diaspora one of its most beloved on-screen couples.
If you want to see him at full voltage, start with Days of Being Wild. The barefoot cha-cha scene in front of the mirror — soundtracked by Xavier Cugat's "Perfidia" — is one of the most-quoted moments in all of Cantonese cinema. People still rewatch it the way earlier generations rewatched Chow Yun-fat sliding across a bar in God of Gamblers.
The Cantonese he gave us
Leslie Cheung's screen presence came with a vocabulary. Every Hong Konger of a certain age can quote the whisper he gave to Carina Lau in Days of Being Wild:
無腳嘅雀仔
mou4 goek3 ge3 zoek3 zai2
Meaning: "The bird without legs."
Explanation: From his monologue in Days of Being Wild: "I've heard that there is a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life — that is when it dies." Leslie's character identifies himself with it. After 1 April 2003, the whole city understood why.
His legacy
In 2003 Leslie Cheung died by suicide. In the note he left he wrote simply that he had been fighting severe depression. His sister later confirmed clinical depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, pushing back on tabloid narratives that blamed anything from his career to his relationship.
The response was unlike anything Hong Kong had seen since the handover. The Mandarin Oriental received so many floral tributes that staff had to arrange daily removals. CASH — the Composers and Authors Society of Hong Kong — created the CASH Golden Sail Music Award and later renamed one of its honours in his memory. In 2010, CNN included him on their list of the twenty-five greatest Asian actors of all time.
What Leslie Cheung left behind is not just a shelf of albums and a filmography. He gave the Cantonese diaspora permission to be stylish, soft, defiant, queer, melancholy and beloved all at once. In an industry that preferred its leading men chiselled and silent, he was a leading man who wore eyeliner, kissed another man on stage, cried in his own songs, and still made your grandmother cry too. For every 靚爆鏡 Mirror Breaks sweatshirt wearer who has ever walked into a room and known they looked good, there is a bit of Gor Gor in that confidence.
He never fully came out in words. He did not have to. He stood on a stage and sang. Every 1 April since 2003, the flowers show up at the Mandarin Oriental again. And in a city that forgets most of its heroes within a decade, that is as close to permanence as Hong Kong gets.
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