As she settles into her dressing room chair at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Lee Heung-kam looks tired. She's been getting only three to four hours of sleep a night.
'Television, film parts, travelling to Australia and Malaysia for charity concerts, heading over to Macau for Cantonese opera performances - sometimes I worry that I won't recover,' she says. It's been a hectic 12 months for Lee. Since her return to TVB, she has starred in two television series, culminating in more than 70 one-hour episodes for the channel, including a part in Moonlight Resonance, one of the most-watched soap operas in the station's 32-year history.
Somehow she has managed to fit in a fortnight's location shooting for Vincent Kok Tak-chiu's festive comedy All's Well, Ends Well 2009 - in which she plays the matriarch of an eccentric family - not to mention her part in Crazy For Her, a play that began its 28 performances on January 1 (the reason we are meeting at the academy, where the play is being staged). It's an impressive list of accomplishments, given that Lee is now 77.
One of Hong Kong's most revered actresses, Lee started out in Cantonese opera at the age of 16, before turning to film in the 1960s and then television in the 1970s. She's now in a position to pick and choose her roles.
'People would call me up and ask whether I was interested in a particular part. If it involved only two or three days of shooting, I rejected it outright,' she says. 'What's the point? It would mean only a fleeting appearance on screen. One part required me to play a policewoman. Can you imagine me marching around at my age? But word soon got out and rumours began to spread that I wasn't interested in making films any more.'
She nearly turned down All's Well, Ends Well 2009, too. '[The film's producer-actor Raymond Wong] Pak-ming got someone to get in touch with me and they said it would involve seven or eight days of work,' she says.
'Again, I was thinking it's going to be a small role.'