About a decade ago, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk received an invitation to be part of a Hollywood blockbuster which, if she had agreed to do, would have propelled her to the international A-list. She read the screenplay, reflected briefly on the premise, and said no to X2, the second instalment of the X-Men franchise.
Cheung might once have been indiscriminate in picking parts - the actress made more than 70 films from 1984, when she made her silver-screen debut in the Wong Jing romantic comedy Prince Charming, to 1999, when she played an acupuncturist trying to adjust to Parisian life and the attention of a French martial arts fanatic in Anne Fontaine's Augustin, King of Kung-Fu. But she has been selective about the roles she wants to play in the 21st century.
She has starred in only five films since 2000, two for her mentor Wong Kar-wai - In the Mood for Love and 2046 - and one for Andrew Lau Wai-keung (Sausalito), Zhang Yimou (Hero) and Olivier Assayas (Clean). The last film, Clean, saw her win a Best Actress award at Cannes in 2004. She played the role of a single mother recovering from drug addiction and a spell in prison.
Since then, she has had cameos in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds - her scenes as a cinema proprietor in Paris were deleted from the final cut - and the Chinese-language romantic comedy Hot Summer Days, where she played a nameless, weeping customer in a sushi restaurant, plus an appearance last year as the goddess Mazu in Isaac Julien's video installation Ten Thousand Waves.
The disparate nature of these films reveals what drives Cheung's success: her edge lies in the tenacity towards maintaining her arthouse-darling profile and an on-screen versatility that allows her to do just that.
Speaking last year about Cheung, Assayas - who was married to the actress from 1998 to 2001 - described her as 'both part of the past and the present' that characterises a malleability which filmmakers would die for.