SHE'S BEEN DUBBED 'a flesh bomb' throughout her acting career; she was forced to call in the receivers in her 20s; her ex-husband took out newspaper advertisements to declare that he didn't father their daughter. None of these setbacks rattles Tina Leung Kwok-hing today - she describes it all in a matter of fact way, as if reading from a screenplay.
Yet mention communism, and the composed facade crumbles. Seemingly, not even a broken marriage can compare with the anguish she feels at the triumph of capitalism in China.
'I had all the fame and fortune that I could want, but I threw it all away and returned to the mainland to work for socialism,' says Leung. 'But now it's like, as Marx had said, we have to become a capitalist society before we move on to a communist one. But I've spent so many years in a capitalist society in Hong Kong and overseas - do I have to go through it all again?' She pauses as tears well in her eyes. 'Ah, it's quite depressing.'
Such sentiments about China aren't entirely unheard of here - Hong Kong has its share of disgruntled former left-wing radicals - but what casts Leung apart was how she arrived at such ideals.
Now a wealthy businesswoman selling satellite navigation technology in Europe, Leung isn't known for her political activism. Rather, her claim to fame remains her showbiz career. Her exotic-sounding stage name, Ti Na, is forever attached to the racy films she made in the 1960s, as well as the many admirers she attracted and spurned.
But Leung is back in Hong Kong to anchor A Century of China, an eight-part documentary about the history of 20th-century China that started on TVB last Wednesday. The entertainment press pester her for comments on the current batch of actors, but the scribbling stops when she launches a long discourse about the communists' role in the second world war. Leung is keenly aware of her saucy legacy, as she rails against how her interview on TVB's Hong Kong Live in March was handled. 'I wanted a live broadcast of my interview, but they just wouldn't agree,' she says. 'The result was that they cut out the bits of me talking about political and social issues - and what's left is the [showbiz-related] bits. It's sad, you know - local TV is sad. I tried once to turn the television on and support TVB a bit, but there's just no way I would watch any of the stuff.'