More than a decade ago, Charlie Young Choi-nei was a fresh-faced, long-haired singer-actress who performed lovelorn ballads and graced the covers of teen magazines. She was marketed as the girl next door; pretty yet approachable, a sweetie whom besotted schoolboys would have been proud to introduce to their parents. Posters bearing the chubby face of the 19-year-old teen queen sold like hot cakes in the shopping malls of Mong Kok.
That was then.
Thirteen years on and Young is no longer a manufactured product dished up to gullible youths. At the age of 32, she suits all kinds of acting roles - and she accepts them with relish. She dived back into showbiz as Jackie Chan's girlfriend in New Police Story. Then she became a mother with a primary-school child in Patrick Tam Ka-ming's After This Our Exile, which will be released on Thursday. She also plays a mute Thai girl in Oxide Pang's Time To Kill, alongside Hollywood's Nicolas Cage.
The Young we see today has been shaped by adversity. Since turning her back on the entertainment business in 1997, she has endured failure in attempts to become an image consultant and a television producer; failure made painfully public by a pitiless media. To compound her misery, she has split up with her boyfriend, Singaporean Khoo Shao Tze, who was also her business partner.
YOUNG, DRESSED IN a light-blue zip-up sweater and jeans, apologises for having arrived late at the M1nt club, in Central. Glamorous she is not. 'Let's see if this is better,' she says, after changing into a little black dress she happened to have with her. Salvatore Ferragamo may sponsor her but this
dress - bought in Paris - shows she needs no pointers when it comes to style. She is bright and playful - sticking her tongue out at After This Our Exile co-star Aaron Kwok Fu-shing when he yells, 'You're so pretty today' - and never falters, however probing the questions.
