Cheung is the coiffed, starched Mrs. Chan in Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love, a tense, moody, unconventional love story set in 1960s Hong Kong.

Time magazine judged it third in its top 10 films of 2000; it beat Gladiator and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the title of best non-European film at the European film awards; its male lead, Tony Leung, won best actor at Cannes in 2000; and it won best cinematography and editing, also at Cannes, for Mark Li Ping-bing and Australian-born Christopher Doyle.

The film took an extraordinary 15 months to film, despite cult director Wong's desire for a quick, simple project after the difficult Happy Together.

Wong has said they only reason he showed In The Mood For Love at Cannes was to give it a deadline.

He has also described that time as the most miserable period of his life after bureaucratic hassles in China, the Asian economic crisis and last-minute technical difficulties.

Cheung and her co-star, Leung, play a shipping company secretary and a newspaper editor who live side by side in a crowded block of flats and whose respective spouses are having an affair.

The two console one another, plot to confront their guilty partners, and fall in love. The audience never meets the spouses.

Cheung spent fours hours a day having her hair done and her make-up applied, and spent every scene in a succession of beautiful-but-restrictive, sheath-like cheongsams to create an elegant character appropriate to the period.

"It was very difficult as an actor to be in that kind of emotion that lasted for 15 months," Cheung says from her home in Paris.

"I felt uptight in those clothes and there are a lot of limitations that come with clothes like that. Even when you are slapping a man in the face you can’t move as you normally would," she says.

Wong, best known for films like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together, allows his scripts to evolve with the input of the cast and the circumstances, a process Cheung says is rewarding, but difficult.

"We really found the film together," she says. "We started with zero together, no script, and I certainly don't get to do that every time. The first six months I had no idea what I was in for, but (Wong) was waiting for me to find the character myself.

"I only realised that half-way into the shoot. He was never just going to give me the character.

"He wants it to be that way with us and so it was a special experience for all of us. I was grateful he did it this way. She (Mrs. Chan) grew. I think if we just did the film in two months straight it wouldn’t have worked. The woman kind of grew inside me, and that takes time."

CHEUNG can pick and choose her films. She has won more acting awards than any other Hong Kong woman, including four Best Actress awards in the Hong Kong film awards, and was the first Chinese woman to win Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

She won critical acclaim for her role in Wong's first film, As Tears Go By and for the title role in Olivier Assayas?French film Irma Vep. Cheung is married to Assayas.

She says the opportunity to work with Wong again was too good to refuse.

"I would jump at any chance to work with (Wong)," she says.

"Everything you do at this age (she is 36) is important. When you are no loner 21 it needs to be memorable, or worthwhile."