Young, Charlie (楊采妮)

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Young, Charlie – Critical Biography Top

Taiwan-born Hong Kong actress Charlie Young (aka Charlie Yeung) began her career as a singer in the early 1990s. However, she quickly began appearing in films. Her first major role was an important role in Wong Kar-wai’s martial-arts epic Ashes of Time (1994). She also made a memorable appearance in Wong’s Fallen Angels (1995) a year later. Young soon found herself at the height of her popularity as an actress and star, and throughout the 1990s she would work with some of Hong Kong’s top directors: with Tsui Hark on the box-office hit The Lovers (1994) and Love in the Time of Twilight (1995); with Jacob Cheung on The Intimates (1997); and with Wong Jing on Future Cops (1993) and High Risk (1995).

In 1997, Young announced her retirement from the film industry to pursue her own personal goals. She was away from the industry for nearly a decade before she returned to acting in 2004 with New Police Story (2004), starring Jackie Chan. Since then, she has had high profile roles in Tsui Hark’s Seven Swords (2005), Patrick Tam’s After This, Our Exile (2006), the Pang Brothers’ Hollywood remake of Bangkok Dangerous (2008), in which Young appeared opposite Nicholas Cage, as well as Yim Ho’s Floating City (2012). In 2013, Young made her debut as a film director with Christmas Rose (2013), a courtroom drama starring Aaron Kwok as a defense attorney-turned-prosecutor who is assigned a case of sexual assault involving a respected doctor and a disabled piano teacher (Taiwanese actress Gwei Lun-Mei). At its financing stage, Young’s film won an award at the 2009 Hong Kong Film Financing Forum (HAF) for Young’s ability to raise funds for the film’s entire budget over the course of the three-day event.