Maggie Cheung gets 55 million views within a day on new Douyin account

HONG KONG – Former actress Maggie Cheung, who has kept a low profile for more than a decade, surprised her fans when she started an account on Douyin on Tuesday (Nov 22).

On the video-sharing platform, China's equivalent of TikTok, the 58-year-old Hong Kong star shared two videos from 2005 and 2008.

After just one day, her posts had 55 million views, and she has close to half a million followers and more than one million "likes".

She said she found the clips while cleaning up old files on a computer.

"As I rewatched the videos, I was struck by the realisation that time has gone by too fast," she wrote.

The 2008 video gave a behind-the-scenes look at a shoot by photographer-film-maker Rene Habermacher, with Cheung in various sultry poses, such as lounging on a bed.

In her second clip from 2005, she is seen cycling along the streets of Paris, where she has continued to live even after her divorce from French director Olivier Assayas in 2001. In the video, she is also seen window shopping and cycling beside the river Seine.

Cheung is best known for acting in the Wong Kar Wai classic In the Mood for Love (2000). She won multiple best actress prizes at the Golden Horse Awards as well as at Cannes and Berlin film festivals before turning her back on movies in the mid-2000s.

She wrote: "Although the person I see in the videos seems a little like a stranger to me, and the situations then are very different from my current life, I still find it hard to believe that it has been 10 years."

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This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.