Christy Chung Biography / Pictures

Christy Chung (born 19 September 1970) born in Montreal to a Chinese father and a Vietnamese mother.

Biography

Christy Chung grew up in Brossard, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, with French and Vietnamese as mother-tongues. She later learned English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

While studying for a career in the tourism industry at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), she entered and won the "Miss Chinese Montreal" contest in 1992. Christy Chung then went to Hong Kong, in her first trip away from home, to participate in the Miss Chinese International pageant in January 1993, in which she won despite not knowing a single Chinese word. This opened doors for her to launch her acting career there, despite not speaking a word of Cantonese at the time, and despite her extremely limited acting experience (an uncredited ten-second non-speaking role as a gum-chewing prostitute in Denys Arcand's Love and Human Remains). She had to choose between acting in Hong Kong and becoming the weather-forecast presenter at Société Radio-Canada, the French-language government television network in Canada.

A role in The Bride with White Hair 2 brought her instant recognition, and she became a well-known star in Chinese-language popular culture, acting in a large number of films including some films starring Stephen Chow, as well as The Bodyguard from Beijing starring Jet Li. Christy was married for a time to Glen Ross, and gave birth to daughter (Yasmine) in Montreal in the middle of the 1998 Ice Storm. Christy and Ross were divorced in 2002, but remain on good terms. Chung has sole custody of Yasmine.

Giving birth to Yasmine temporarily had a negative effect on her career because of a stereotypical impression that a mother could not function as a sex symbol, but her career recovered in 2000. More recently, she had roles in Samsara and Jackie Chan's movie The Medallion. Christy Chung added Thai to her language repertoire when she starred in Nonzee Nimibutr's 2001 film Jan Dara. Singapore FHM magazine voted her the "Sexiest Woman in Asia" in 2000.

In August 2003, Chung remarried to a music producer named Jon in Beijing.

Christy Chung is also known to be a fan of English football club Chelsea.

Despite her success, she remains mostly unknown in Quebec, where she was born and grew up, because she has done most of her film work in Cantonese.

Chung was recently seen at the 2007 Sina Awards and is currently working on an album.