Anita Mui

Age: 61

Birthday: October 10, 1963

Nationality: Hong Konger

Gender: Female

With a career that began in her early childhood, Anita Mui Yim Fong was a Hong Kong singer and actress making major contributions to the Cantopop music scene and receiving numerous awards and honors. She remained an idol throughout her career, and is regarded as a Cantopop diva. She was dubbed as the "daughter of Hong Kong" and is considered one of the most iconic Cantopop singers. After winning a singing contest in 1982, her life in the limelight began. In the early stages of her career her image was a little bit tomboy-ish and sexy (which was the reason she was called the "Madonna of Hong Kong"), and some of her songs were considered too risqué, with one of them, "Bad Girl", actually being banned from airplay due to its suggestive content. She started her acting career at about the same time, often starring with Anthony Chan, including Huai nu hai (1986) and Yi qi liang fu (1988). Other acting partners included Jackie Chan and Leslie Cheung. Both her singing and acting careers were a success. She won an enormous number of "Best Female Singer" and "Most Popular Female Singer" awards in the 1980s, and her acting career's climax was winning "Best Actress" awards (Golden Horse Award and the inaugural Golden Dragon Awards in Taiwan, Hong Kong Film Award, and the Pan-Asia Pacific Film Festival) in 1987 for Stanley Kwan's "Rouge" Yin ji kau (1988). In the early 1990s she announced her "half" retirement from the singing industry. However, by popular demand, she continued to record albums and to act in movies, and by 1994, she engineered a full comeback to great critical and popular acclaim. On 5 September 2003, Mui publicly announced that she had cervical cancer, from which her sister had also died. The actress eventually succumbed to cervical cancer and died of respiratory complications leading to lung failure at Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital on December 30th, 2003 at 2:50am Hong Kong Time, she was 40 years old. Anita Mui was cremated and her ashes are interred at the Po Lin Monastery's mausoleum on Lantau Island. (Source: IMDb and Wikipedia).