Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing (September 12, 1956 – April 1, 2003) (; Cantonese , Jyutping: zoeng1 kwok3 wing4; Mandarin Pinyin: Zhāng Guóróng, Wade-Giles: Chang Kuo-jung; nickname "Gor-gor" (哥哥, "Elder Brother" in Cantonese) was an actor and a musician from Hong Kong.

Childhood and Education

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Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong. His birth name was Cheung Fat-chung, which was later changed to Cheung Kwok-wing. Cheung was the youngest of 10 children in a middle-class family. His father was a fairly well-known tailor, whose customers included the American actors William Holden and Cary GrantKevin Thomas, "A Career In Full Plume", Los Angeles Times, June 22nd, page 6, 1997 Michel Ciment, Hubert Niogret, "Interview of Leslie Cheung", Positif no. 455/1999, Berlin, conducted on 21th February 1998 Chitose Shima, "Leslie Cheung Interview", All About Leslie, P25-40, Sangyo Henshu Center Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, 1999, ISBN4-916199-10-3. His parents divorced when he was quite young. At the age of 13, he was sent to England as a boarder at Norwich School and faced racial discrimination at the school. He worked as a bartender at his relatives' restaurant and sang during the weekends. It was around this period that he chose his name, "Leslie". According to Cheung, he chose this name because "I love the film Gone with the Wind. And I like Leslie Howard. The name can be a man's or woman's, it's very unisex, so I like it."Richard Corliss, "Forever Leslie", Time Asia, vol. 157, No. 18, May, 2001, [http://www.time.com/time/asia/arts/magazine/0,9754,108021,00.html.

In several of his interviews, Cheung stated that he had a fairly unhappy childhood. "I didn't have a happy childhood. Arguments, fights and we didn't live together; I was brought up by my granny." (Time magazine interview with Richard CorlissRichard Corliss, "Forever Leslie", Time Asia, vol. 157, No. 18, May, 2001, "What I would say most affected me as a child, was that my parents were not at home with me. As a young kid, one could not always understand why his parents weren't at home. This made me depressed sometimes."Leslie Cheung, "Leslie Cheung Autobiography", Commercial Radio Hong Kong, 1985, (also collected in Album Collection History-His Story by Capital Artist, 2004), an English translation can be found in [http://www.geocities.com/yannipoo/autobioindex.html

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