Anita Yuen

The Risk of Having No Filter

Anita Yuen won the Miss Hong Kong pageant in 1990. She was only 18 years old and had a determination that unsettled executives at the TVB network. She wasn't interested in being a friendly face on variety shows. She wanted to act, and made that clear from her very first contract.

In 1992, she made her film debut in The Days of Being Dumb. She won the Best New Actress award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. It marked the start of a winning streak that no one in the Asian film industry has been able to match.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1993, she starred in C'est la vie, mon chéri under director Derek Yee. She played a young woman with cancer who stays optimistic. The role earned her the Best Actress award. But what happened the following year broke every record of the era.

In 1994, she filmed He’s a Woman, She’s a Man opposite Leslie Cheung. She cut her hair and pretended to be a man to break into the music industry within the story. She won her second consecutive Best Actress award. No woman had won two consecutive trophies in that top category until then.

The Veto of Major Stars

Anita is known for being blunt. Too blunt for a system built on hierarchy and silence. In 1995, she worked with Jackie Chan on the action film Thunderbolt. The shoot was tense. She refused to return to the set to re-record some lines of dialogue after the main production had wrapped.

That gesture came at a steep price. Chan publicly complained about her attitude, and the other major Hong Kong directors turned their backs on her. Her career in big-budget cinema came to a sudden halt for years. But she didn't apologize until two decades later (in a private meeting arranged by Eric Tsang).

She didn't keep quiet.

During that period away from the big screen, she turned to television in mainland China and Taiwan. In 1999, she played the popular heroine in the series Hua Mu Lan. The production drew huge ratings across Asia and let her maintain her salary status despite the lull in film work in her hometown.

Figures and Technical Comebacks

In 2023, she returned to the spotlight with Be Water, My Friend. She co-starred with Chow Yun-fat in a drama about autism and second chances. The film took in more than $40 million at the Chinese box office during its first weeks in theaters.

In 2024, she took part in the action thriller Customs Frontline. She plays a high-ranking officer caught up in an international arms trafficking plot. The shoot included real-risk scenes at the Hong Kong port, with very few stunt doubles used for the dialogue scenes on deck.

The actress has one of the most stable relationships in the industry with actor Julian Cheung. They secretly married in the United States in 2001. Their son Morton was born in 2006, and since then she has limited her contracts to a maximum of two long-term projects per calendar year.

Her advertising contract with a Japanese cosmetics company has remained in place since 1996, continuing through nearly thirty years of business partnership.