Tony Leung Chiu Wai is part of a generation of extraordinarily versatile Hong Kong actors that includes Chow Yun-Fat, Andy Lau, and Anthony Wong Chau-Sang. Leung, who made his film debut in 1983, has worked with all of the important Hong Kong directors in all of the major film genres. His role as an undercover cop in John Woo's Hard-Boiled (1992), opposite Chow, made him a star, and another undercover assignment, in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-2003), won him Best Actor awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival in 2003. In Johnnie To's upcoming Election, he plays a vicious, duplicitous gangster.

Internationally, however, Leung is most strongly identified with the films of Wong Kar-wai. He appears in the last scene of 1991's Days of Being Wild (he bowed out of a bigger part when, in a bizarre episode during its production, his girlfriend was briefly kidnapped, then released) and played the Blind Swordsman in Wong's long-in-the-making martial-arts drama Ashes of Time (1994). In his standout performances for the director, Leung paints the screen with portraits of loneliness. In Chungking Express (1994) he plays the sweetly mournful Cop 633. In Happy Together (1997), as half of a gay couple, Leung is the long-suffering victim of boyfriend Leslie Cheung's caprices. In In the Mood for Love (2000) and the current 2046, he plays Mr. Chow, a writer who scrapes by making a marginal living from low-culture popular fiction. Although Mr. Chow is a soft, wounded man in In the Mood for Love, unable to claim the woman he loves, and an edgy womanizer in 2046, in both films Leung’s manner is reserved and enigmatic. His characters reflect his public persona-shy, introverted, and self-effacing. Leung has spoken about the connection between his low-key manner and the trauma of his early childhood, when his father abandoned his family, after which he became quite withdrawn.

Leung has been widely acclaimed for the subtlety, richness, and layered depths of his sympathetic performances. At the 2000 Cannes Film Festival he won the Best Actor award for his starring role in In the Mood for Love. One of his two Best Actor awards at the Golden Horse Film Festival was for Chungking Express. Four times he has won as Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards, for Chungking Express, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046.

Publicly, Leung has been reluctant to speak about his opinions since an incident in 2002. B International, an English-language magazine, quoted him as supporting the 1989 crackdown by the Chinese government against protesters in Tiananmen Square. "I didn't join in any demonstrations because what the Chinese government did was right, to maintain stability, which was good for everybody." When questioned about this at that year's premiere of Zhang Yimou's spectacular Hero, he claimed to have been speaking from the perspective of his character, the only mercenary opposed to killing the emperor. Leung said, "I am just an actor; my interest is in making movies." During a visit to New York in May 2005, Leung spoke to Cineaste about his longtime association making movies with Wong.-Martha Nochimson