Maggie Cheung – Asian Goddess..

I’ve been dying to share this post with you on Maggie Cheung (Man Yuk), one of my all time favorite Asian actresses. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Maggie, she has been in a lot of movies, a few being ‘In the Mood for Love’, ‘Irma Vep”’, ‘Hero’, and ‘Clean’.

I had the pleasure in working with Maggie once in Los Angeles, (as well as the gorgeous Michael Wong) for an Ericsson commercial. I just happened to be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time, just as they were casting for the HK ad campaign, (which turned out to be so successful, it was cited as a case study in the Harvard Business Review). I was hired to do the hair for the main actors including Maggie and Michael and a couple of other Asian American actors. This was such a surprise for me as I was hired before I found out who I would be working on. Initially it was meant to be Gong Li, who had trouble getting her work permit fast enough so it ended up being Maggie instead, much to my delight.

Memories of the commercial:

I found her to be charming and lovely as well as a little mischievous as she kept fluffing her hair to make it more ‘punky’ while the directors of Ericsson kept telling me to ‘calm it down’. She also told me that she’d always wanted to be a hairdresser and even applied to work at Sassoon’s while living in the UK, luckily for her, she didn’t get in, and the rest as you know, is history!

I also found this shoot to be quite challenging as Maggie’s hair was permed into a tight afro look at the time, so my first challenge for the first scene was to flatten and calm it all down into a slicked look!! A fantastic 3 day shoot in Malibu at a gorgeous house, great fun memories. And I must say Thank’s to both Maggie and Michael for their hand written referrals to put towards my green card application to come to the US.

While on the subject of Maggie Cheung, I’ve put together a slideshow of some of her looks that I love.. Enjoy!

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