Sally Yeh

Her credits as an actress include Shanghai Blues and The Occupant (both 1984), and Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (o.t. Do Ma Den, 1986), probably her finest performance (and Best Actress Award at the 1986 Hong Kong Movie Festival), though her screen fame rests chiefly on her role as the blind piano-bar singer Jennie in John Woo's The Killer (Die xue shuang xiong, 1989).

Born in Taipei, she grew up in Canada. Yeh's singing career started in the early 1980s and exploded in the following decade thanks to a series of well though-out and executed releases - thirty albums, plus forty-odd compilations, best of's and live recordings. Yeh sounds excellent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and her jazz-trained vocals allow her to handle a wide range of musical genres. Apart from a good record track of original hits, Sally Yeh has covered through the years a number of Western songs, ranging from Madonna to Celine Dion by way of the M*A*S*H title song. She has also collaborated on a number of soundtracks (mostly on Tsui Hark's movies), including the international hit A Chinese Ghost Story (1987).

Yeh's career seemed destined to take a slower pace after her marriage in 1996 to Hong Kong pop star and composer/producer George Lam, and her catalogue was considered ready to be shelved in the oldies section by most; but in 2002 Yeh unespectedly made a re-entry on the cantopop market, her new record ("You Hear") followed by a concert tour, and by early 2003 she had again two titles in the Hong Kong hit parade. With new records following, her carreer seems all but done for. She is the only Hong Kong singer to have been four times the recipient of the Hong Kong Best Female Singer award.

See also:

• Cantopop
• Cinema of China

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