“She tells the truth, and she also tells the guy, ‘I love you’. This is very different for a Chinese girl – that generation are still very old-fashioned. To say ‘I love you’ is not that difficult, but for Chinese girls [it is].”

Considering Yuen’s independent stance, and the tomboyish on-screen image she cultivated, it is surprising that her career started in a very conventional way – she was crowned Miss Hong Kong in 1990, at the age of 18.

This led to a contract with dominant terrestrial broadcaster TVB in the Hong Kong fashion, although Yuen took control of her career early on, and managed to whittle it down to two years instead of the customary five.

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Yuen always seemed a little confused by her pageant win. “I have never thought of myself as beautiful,” she told the Post in 1994. “I have no illusions about that. I think I only won the beauty pageant as I look comfortable. That’s why I have never insisted on being treated like a beauty on set.”

She impressed critics, and won the award for best new performer in the Hong Kong Film Awards (HKFA) for her efforts. Although she always wanted to be “in the front”, most of her early roles were “vases” – the local term given to actresses who are not given much to do in a film other than look beautiful.

“I worked my way up from the bottom on set,” she told the Post. “For eight movies I played the vase, the decorative piece that had nothing much to do than stand around.”

She won her first HKFA best actress award for her performance, even though she did not feel she deserved it.

“I am not ready to win; I haven’t gathered enough points. Even if other people feel I am ready for it, I personally don’t think so. In a few years, when I am more mature, I can probably give better performances,” she told the Post.

Yuen, like all other actresses in the 1990s, was not very choosy about her roles after that; the aim was always to make as much money as possible while at the top.

But she did appear in a number of well-regarded contemporary-set films for Peter Chan, notably He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, in which she disguised herself as a boy.

She won her second HKFA best actress award for the role.

“The four films she made with Peter Chan during this period really made her, especially He’s a Woman, She’s a Man and its follow-up two years later, Who’s the Woman, Who’s the Man,” says Derek Elley, the critic who brought Chan’s work to international attention.

“Chan has always been a great director of actresses, and he seems to have responded to Yuen’s Audrey Hepburn-ish, gazelle-like, nervous quality which especially fitted the cross-dressing theme of He’s a Woman.

“At the time, Yuen had an unaffected, natural quality which was very different from the more artificial style of many other Hong Kong actresses,” Elley says.

At the height of her success, Yuen garnered a reputation for being difficult to work with. “Anita Yuen has a reputation of being loud, stubborn, and opinionated about most things – especially when they relate to her. And she knows it,” the Post said in 1998.

Peter Chan said he found her difficult to work with from the start. He was worried about casting Yuen in Tom, Dick and Hairy, as he felt she lacked the experience for the role, and things came to a head when she refused to wear a bra when in character. Chan felt that this showed she misunderstood the character she was playing.

“We were on the verge of replacing her, until we put her in front of the camera on the first day of shooting, and it was like ‘Wow’!”, he told Miles Wood in 1998. “That was when I really fell in love with her as an actress.”

“It’s not easy working with her, as she was spoiled rotten. It’s a love/hate relationship. Sometimes I can’t stand working with her on set, she just can’t control herself. But every time I do casting, I think of her, as she’s so good,” Chan told Wood.

Yuen did address this issue in an interview with the Post’s Winnie Chung in 1998. “I’ve asked Peter [Chan] what kind of person I was when I was a newcomer, and he said I was a busybody but I always knew what I was doing. A lot of newcomers don’t seem to know what they are doing,” she said.

After the successes of the early 1990s, Yuen did not seem to know where to take her career. Like many Hong Kong actresses she tried singing, and recorded a Mandopop album in Taiwan. She was not pleased with the result, which did not sell well, and she complained that the recording was rushed.

Competition from Hollywood meant that fewer films were being made in the second half of the 1990s. Yuen decided she needed a change of image to keep up with the times.

“I can’t make any more films like C’est La Vie, Mon Cheri, as I’ve become more mature as a woman,” she told the Post. “I look and feel completely different about things, and I’ve become more mature. I couldn’t do that again, so I have to look at other options.”

“I’m not ready to quit, as I still love acting, But I just don’t want roles that require me to skip around and look cute, or have that wide-eyed cute look – not unless I’m playing an idiot. That would make me throw up watching myself on the screen,” she said.

Although she never again hit the heights of her earlier on-screen outings, Yuen’s acting talent continued to be recognised by the industry and viewers alike, and she has kept working throughout the 2000s.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.