In 1995, Leung Yin-fong was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She travelled to London and met the queen at Buckingham Palace. They chatted about Leung's charitable work - she founded the Kwan Fong Charitable Foundation with Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan of cake shop fame in 1984 - but what Queen Elizabeth may not have known is that she, too, was meeting royalty. Leung has a stage name and, as Fong Yim-fun, she was once the queen of Cantonese opera.
In many ways, she still reigns - certainly in people's memories if not on stage. Last Friday, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts awarded her an Honorary Fellowship for her contribution to the arts.
Alongside her, also being recognised by the APA, was Jackie Chan who knows a thing or two about today's fame and fans. But in the days before television when people wanted to see Cantonese opera, Fong was as popular as it was possible to be in Hong Kong.
Although she officially retired at the end of 1958, when she was still in her 30s, her aficionados have remained as loyal to her as Chan's following. She has emerged three times in the past four decades to raise money for charity, and people have flocked to hear her: in her comeback in 1987, she raised $12 million for her foundation.
Her most recent appearance was last year at the Cultural Centre on November 11 - Remembrance Day, appropriately enough - and she insists that that was definitely her final one.
Does she mean it? She laughs. Sitting in her Kowloon home, surrounded by flowers and portraits of the family for whom she gave up a career, she is like a delightfully approachable royal. 'Everybody asks me this. But now I'm old and the children say: 'Mummy, you promised you wouldn't do it again.' I feel very happy that I can do it and I enjoy it, but it's tough. There are fewer and fewer people around to do the costumes, the set, the make-up.' She started singing as a child, and it was soon apparent she had a gift which required nurturing. 'So my mother, who was very, very important to me, took me to opera school. At day I went to normal school, at night to opera school.' By the time she was 11, she had begun to play adult roles; the arrival of the Japanese in Hong Kong meant that she grew up quickly in real life, too. She has always been recognised as a woman who can convey heart-breaking emotion - on stage, she could cry at the snap of a finger - and she says that what she saw during the occupation deepened her performances. Her vocal style, as she describes it, was an ability 'to go all the way up to heaven and all the way down to hell'.
