Maggie Cheung

Was offered a role in X2: X-Men United (2003) but turned it down because "If I start making films like that, they won't be proud. I'd feel like I was cheating. And I don't want half the world, we have 1.3 billion people in China, to know I'm cheating. That matters to me. I have more pride than that."
Is fluent in English, French and Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin, and understands Shanghainese).
Declined lead role in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) because of racial sensitivity between the Japanese and the Chinese, due to WWII.
Filmed a role in Inglourious Basterds (2009) but all of her scenes were deleted from the final cut.
In Hong Kong, she has been handed every role she has played since she was 18 without an audition.

No matter where I'm going, I feel like I'm leaving something behind. Every time I get on a plane, I cry. The flight attendants on Cathay Pacific must think I'm mad.
...you experience a lot more pain than normal people, your mom dies, your dad dies, your boyfriend chucks you, you live in the street, and you're really going through these emotions. You're trying to know what it feels like to watch a man die in front of you, as if you've really lived it. Once that division is gone, it gets blurry, you look back at a shoot and think, was I really that sad because in the film my boyfriend didn't like me -- or was it something else, something real? [on being an actress]
If I was drinking something [in my house], they said, 'Oh, she got dumped, she's so miserable she's turning to drink'. Or if my mother and sister came over, they said, 'She's so miserable she needs her family to support her through this hard time.'" [on her experience with the Hong Kong paparazzi]
Words like 'fabulous,' 'wonderful,' 'great,' 'absolutely gorgeous,' they don't exist in Cantonese. It's good, or it's O.K. That's it. It's very blunt, Cantonese. I appreciate that there are no fake words, but it's hard to switch channels, sometimes, after I've spent time in France. I'm just learning to use more generous words myself, but you know, 'gorgeous,' I just can't go to that extreme.
It was heaven. We were in Los Angeles. And we could go anywhere. No one had any idea who I was.