Fans, friends and family of the late Hong Kong-American singer-songwriter Coco Lee (李玟) yesterday gathered for her funeral in Hong Kong, paying respects to the star who died at the age of 48 after a career spanning three decades.
In a park outside the funeral home in the eastern part of Hong Kong island, hundreds of fans dressed in black held up banners for Lee as they lined up to enter a funeral hall that was due to be opened up to the public after a private service.
“The love you leave behind has become an ocean of stars,” read one banner with a picture of Lee in a long white dress walking up a flight of pearl stairs.
Photo: AP
Lee, who had struggled with depression for several years, died in Queen Mary Hospital on July 5 in Hong Kong, after a suicide attempt three days earlier left her in a coma, her two sisters wrote in a Facebook post at the time.
Among Lee’s most notable performances were voicing the female warrior Mulan in the Mandarin-language version of Disney’s Mulan and performing the Oscar-nominated song A Love Before Time from the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍).
Lee was born in Hong Kong in 1975 and was the youngest of three children of a Hong Kong mother and Malaysian father.
Photo: Billy Dai, AP
Lee was a groundbreaking, ethnically Chinese star who broke onto the international music scene, and became hugely popular in Taiwan and China, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
While she moved to San Francisco in her childhood, she was offered a recording contract in Hong Kong with Capital Artists after high school, prompting her to move back to the territory.
In 1996, Lee signed with Sony Music Entertainment and her debut album, Coco Lee, became the best-selling album of that year in Asia.
Her popularity grew steadily in Asia and across the Pacific, setting her on a path of new collaborations and English-language songs.
Over a nearly 30-year career, she recorded 18 studio albums and appeared in three films.
In 2011, Lee married Bruce Rockowitz, a Canadian businessman who is the former CEO of the Hong Kong supply chain company Li & Fung.
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
Taiwan will now have four additional national holidays after the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment today, which also made Labor Day a national holiday for all sectors. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their majority in the Legislative Yuan to pass the amendment to the Act on Implementing Memorial Days and State Holidays (紀念日及節日實施辦法), which the parties jointly proposed, in its third and final reading today. The legislature passed the bill to amend the act, which is currently enforced administratively, raising it to the legal level. The new legislation recognizes Confucius’ birthday on Sept. 28, the
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS