Doing one film a year, Maggie Cheungwill have plenty of time to smell theflowers.

BEFORE Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li or Michelle Yeoh, only one other Chinese actress was associated with the film Memoirs of a Geisha. Back in 1999, when director Steven Spielberg first announced intentions to shoot Arthur Golden’s controversial, best-selling novel of the same name, it was reported that he had planned to cast Hong Kong movie darling Maggie Cheung as Mameha. Tokyo-born, New York-based dancer Rika Okamoto was to play Nitta Sayuri. But the project kept getting postponed.