Read the complete write-up of Jacky Cheung net worth, biography, wife, children, daughters, age, height, family, parents, songs, movies, tv shows as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Jacky Cheung is a Hong Kong singer, songwriter, and actor. He is the best-selling Chinese music artist and one of the best-selling artists of all time, with sales of over 120 million records worldwide. Cheung has been dubbed the “God of Songs” of contemporary Chinese music and is one of the “Four Heavenly Kings”. He is known for his lengthy, sell-out tours, his best-selling album The Goodbye Kiss, and his personal Private Corner album project, for which he coined the phrase ‘Canto-jazz’.
Early life
| Name | Jacky Cheung |
| Net Worth | $55 million |
| Occupation | Singer, Songwriter, Actor |
| Age | 60 years |
| Height | 1.75m |
| Wife | May Lo |
Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau was born on July 10, 1961 (age 60 years) in Quarry Bay in the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. His father is from Tianjin and his mother is from Shanghai. He attended North Point Government Primary School from 1967 to 1973 and graduated from Literary College in 1978.
Cheung revealed in 2007 that the paternal side of his family is mostly seamen, including his father, paternal cousin, and older brother. His first language is Cantonese, but he also speaks Mandarin and English. He sings Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and modern English pop songs. Cheung is known for his rich baritone voice, but also his dramatic vibrato by rapidly moving his pronounced Adam’s Apple.
Career
Jacky Cheung originally started working as a reservation officer for the airline Cathay Pacific. His music career started when he won the Amateur 18-Hong Kong district singing contest in 1984 with the song “Fatherland” by Michael Kwan. He outcompeted more than 10,000 other contestants. After winning the contest, he was signed by the then Polygram Records, now Universal Music Group. Although encouraged by a bright start, he did not achieve immediate supremacy in Cantopop, then dominated by Leslie Cheung, Alan Tam, Anita Mui, and Danny Chan. In 1985 he won his first two major awards together with the 1985 RTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards and the 1985 Jade Solid Gold Top 10 Awards.
Cheung released the song “Loving You More Every Day” in 1991, a translated version of the Japanese Southern All Stars hit “Midsummer’s Fruit”. The album True Love Expression in 1992, as well as the subsequent release, Love Sparks in 1992, achieved sales of over 400,000 copies in Hong Kong alone. His subsequent albums included 1993 Me and You and 1994 Born to be Wild. In the 1994 Billboard Music Awards in the US, he was named the most popular singer in Asia. He received numerous music awards both in Hong Kong and elsewhere, including the best-selling Chinese singer in the World Music Awards for two consecutive years in 1995 and 1996 held in Monaco. Cheung was also elected as one of the world’s Top Ten Outstanding Young Persons in 1999.
Check Out: Carol Chu net worth
Amongst his hit songs, some of his most famous were “Amour”, “Just want to spend my life with you” and “Goodbye Kiss”. The album The Goodbye Kiss was one of the best-selling albums of all time, achieving more sales in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia than ever attained before, with more than 5 million copies sold in 1993, making him one of PolyGram’s top 10 artists worldwide that year and the first Asian artist to do so. It made him the first singer with non-Taiwanese citizenship to win Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards. The album was also instrumental in helping Cheung break into the mandopop market. Due to these great songs and albums, Cheung is generally considered to be the pre-eminent member of the Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop. He is regarded by some sources as the best singer of the four.
In 1995, Jacky Cheung staged his record-breaking 100-show world tour titled “Yau Hok Yau”, literally a pun of “friendship Jacky Cheung” reusing the same Chinese characters found in his name. The tour started with 34 shows from 8 April to 9 June at the Hong Kong Coliseum. Then the tour continued at Perth Brisbane Australia and returned to Taipei and mainland China. It then expanded to Madison Square Garden in the US, different parts of Europe, Singapore, India, Malaysia, and Japan. He was regarded as the new Michael Jackson by Business Week.
His successful music and acting career have made him one of Hong Kong’s icons. Cheung was elected by Time Magazine as one of the “25 most influential people in the New Hong Kong” in 1996. However, In 2004, Cheung released Life Is Like A Dream, an album in which Jacky co-produced with long-time collaborative partner Michael Au, and Jacky composed the melody for all songs and penned the lyrics for 3 of the songs.
In 1999, he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World by JCI (Junior Chamber International), a worldwide federation of young professionals and entrepreneurs. In 2000 he was awarded the Golden Needle Award by RTHK. This award, the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award, recognized outstanding contributions to the music industry. He expressed his astonishment upon receiving the award, as he was the least experienced living recipient at only 16 years, and this award was awarded to singers, producers, and lyricists that are late in their careers or are semi-retired, in which he was not, but to quash any negative publicity, he clarified that according to his research, there was no stipulation of this sort.
Jacky Cheung won the Best Selling Cantonese Album Award in the Hong Kong IFPI Awards of 2005 with his live album, Jacky Live Performance, which he accepted in person for the first time in years. This is despite poor ticket sales due to the concert being meant to be a one-night-only charity concert in nature and the fact that Jacky attempted to sing mostly songs from other artists for the first time. In the fast-changing scene of canto-pop, Cheung has been able to maintain his popularity and sales power for more than 20 years after his debut, which is unparalleled in the history of Hong Kong pop music.
Cheung staged his “Year of Jacky Cheung World Tour” in 2007. The tour started on 18 February 2007 at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. When the tour ended in Hong Kong on 3 February 2008 after touring 58 cities around the world, a total of 105 shows had been given, attracting more than 2 million fans. 105 became the highest number of shows in a tour by a Chinese artist, breaking the previous record of 100, which was also set by Cheung previously. In that same year, he also released a Mandopop album, By Your Side, in which he was the sole executive producer of the album for the first time after Michael Au suddenly left to further his career in Beijing.
He recorded Private Corner in 2009, his first jazz album for which he coined the phrase “Canto-jazz”. The album was produced by Andrew Tuason. “Everyday Is Christmas”, “Which Way, Robert Frost?”, “Let It Go”, “Lucky in Love” and “Double Trouble” were co-written by Roxanne Seeman in collaboration with Tuason, tailor-made for Cheung. “Lucky in Love” is the end-credit song of “Crossing Hennessy”, a Hong Kong movie starring Jacky Cheung and Tang Wei, produced by Bill Kong. Nokia’s music download service website (Ovi.com) announced that “Everyday Is Christmas” was the 10th most downloaded Christmas song in the world in 2010, joining classic hits such as Wham’s “Last Christmas” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Cheung is the only Chinese language singer to make it into the Top Ten.
In 2010, Cheung started his “Jacky Cheung 1/2 Century World Tour”. This tour started on 30 December 2010 in Shanghai and ended in Hong Kong on 30 May 2012. For 1 year and 5 months, his tour included 5 countries 77 cities, overall 146 shows, more than 2,800,000 audiences. 146 became the highest number of shows in one tour by Chinese artists. The previous record of 105 was also made by Jacky Cheung on his 2007–2008 World Tour. Both the 2007 and 2010 World tour was led by Andrew Tuason as Cheung’s Musical Director.
At the beginning of that year, he also attempted new musical styles. His new album, Private Corner, became his first-ever Jazz album in Cantopop history, it also featured other non-mainstream Cantopop styles such as strings quartet, Waltz, and Hymn. The special edition also featured a special glass CD, also a first in Chinese pop history. “Double Trouble” from Private Corner was a featured produced number in the “Jacky Cheung 1/2 Century World Tour”.
In “Jacky Cheung 1/2 Century World Tour”, he set a Guinness World record for the largest combined audience for a live act in 12 months, with 2,048,553 audience members. The first 12-month of the tour was run from 30 December 2010 to 29 December 2011, with 105 live concerts in 61 cities across China, the USA, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia.
In 2018, he earned a new nickname of “Fugitive Bait” or “Fugitives’ Krytonite” in China as his concerts attracted wanted criminals in China to purchase tickets to watch his concerts in China. He helped to bring 4 wanted criminals to be captured between April to June 2018 during Cheung’s Chinese leg of the world tour. In June, two ticket scalpers were also captured. This was also part of his 233-show, “Jacky Cheung A Classic Tour” world tour, which eclipses the previous tour record. The entire tour, which lasted for 27 months with performances in 97 cities, ended on 29 January 2019 after a series of 15 concerts in Hong Kong.
Other work
Jacky Cheung not only performs solo but often performs duets with female singers. Cheung recorded a duet with Filipino singer and Asia’s Songbird Reg ine Velasquez for the song “In Love with You”; the song was included in her multi-platinum album Listen Without Prejudice. In 2008, Cheung and A-Mei, the popular Taiwanese singer, performed Zhu Fu (“Blessing”) as a duet in a benefit concert for victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
In 1997, his work on the groundbreaking Cantonese Broadway-style musical Snow.Wolf.Lake was enthusiastically received by both audiences and critics. Cheung not only played the male lead, he was also the artistic director for this production. The first female leads were played by Sandy Lam in Hong Kong and Nadia Chan in Singapore. Kit Chan played the second female lead. They achieved 42 consecutive full-house performances at the gigantic Hung Hom Hong Kong Coliseum which remains the record today.
In November 2004, Cheung and his concert manager, Florence Chan Suk-fan, worked on a revised Mandarin version of Snow.Wolf.Lake so as to bring it to a wider audience. The female leads this time were Evonne Hsu and Nadia Chan respectively. The market budget alone exceeded HK$15 million. The estimated budget for this revised production was HK$100 million and the show premiered on 24 December 2004 in Beijing.
Movies
Jacky Cheung is better known for his singing, he has also acted in many films. He received the Best Supporting Actor award in the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards for his work in As Tears Go By (1988) as well as the Best Supporting Actor Golden Horse Award for his work in The Swordsman (1990). That same year he also collaborated with John Woo and Tony Leung in the film Bullet in the Head.
Cheung also received the Best Actor Award at the International Film Festival of India for his work in July Rhapsody (2002). His song Perhaps Love, which serves as the theme song for the 2005 award-winning film of the same name, also won the Best Song Award at the 2005 Hong Kong Film Award and the CASH Best Song Award at the 2006 CASH Gold Sail Music Awards.
Check Out: Tony Leung Chiu Wai net worth
He appeared in the Taiwanese mini-series Love Scar IN 2002 with F4 members Jerry Yan and Karen Mok, where he played Jerry Yan’s older brother. In the 2004 drama film Jiang Hu directed by Wong Ching-po, Cheung plays Lefty, the best friend and right-hand man of crime boss Hung Yan Chau (Andy Lau). The film includes several other actors from Infernal Affairs. As of 2021, he is one of a handful of Chinese singer-actors who have never starred in a television drama.
Ceremonies and spokesperson
Jacky Cheung was named the spokesperson for Hong Kong Disneyland in 2004. He took part in a number of large-scale marketing events organized by The Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, beginning with the hosting of a TV program, Magical World of Disneyland. He recorded a multi-lingual song for Hong Kong Disneyland, entitled One. The music video for One was filmed at Hong Kong Disneyland. He also recorded for Hong Kong Disneyland: The Grand Opening Celebration Album.
In December 2006, Cheung performed live the theme song “Together Now” at the Opening Ceremony of the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar. He was introduced as “the most popular Asian performer in the world”. In 2010, Cheung, Jane Zhang, and K’naan sang a Mandarin version of “Wavin’ Flag (The Celebration Mix)” for the 2010 Fifa World Cup. In 2012, Cheung sang the cheering song of China for the 2012 London Olympics.
Wife
Jacky Cheung is married to his longtime girlfriend Hong Kong actress May Lo Mei-mei, they had their wedding on 15 February 1996 in London. The couple met during the filming of Devoted to You in 1986. The couple has two daughters, Zoe, b. 2000, and Zia, b. 2005. He is a Buddhist and a vegetarian. However, in March 2009 he became the first Cantopop/Mandopop artist to contribute items to the Hard Rock franchise memorabilia collection. Items are to be exhibited at the Hard Rock Hotel in Macau. A joint donation is also made to donate HK$600,000 to the Children’s Cancer Foundation and ORBIS Macau. In September 2009, Cheung was one of the super ambassadors of End Child Sexual Abuse Foundation (ECSAF) founded by Josephine Siao; he attended the charity fundraising event for ECSAF’s 10th anniversary in Hong Kong.
Jacky Cheung net worth
How much is Jacky Cheung worth? Jacky Cheung’s net worth is estimated at around $55 million. His main source of income is from his career as an actor, singer, and songwriter. Cheung’s successful career has earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy cars trips. He is one of the richest and most influential singers in Hong Kong. However, Cheung won the RTHK “Honor of Golden song 35th Anniversary Award” in the 2012 RTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards, as he has the greatest number of RTHK Golden Songs since the award has been started.