Sally Yeh
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Sally Yeh (葉蒨文, pinyin: Yè Qiànwén) sometimes written as Sally Yip or Sin-Man Yip (born September 30, 1961) is a star in both Hong Kong pop and movie scenes.
Her credits as an actress include Shanghai Blues and The Occupant (both 1984), and Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986), probably her finest performance (and Best Actress Award at the 1986 Hong Kong Movie Festival), though her screen fame in the West rests chiefly on her role as the blind piano-bar singer Jennie in John Woo's The Killer (1989).
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, 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 thought-out and executed releases - thirty albums, plus forty-odd compilations 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 Céline Dion by way of the M*A*S*H title song.
Oddly enough Yeh's mastery of written Chinese is rudimentary at best, and she often used romanized phonetics to help her read Cantonese and Mandarin lyrics. Nevertheless, she speaks Cantonese and Mandarin impeccably.
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 unexpectedly made a re-entry on the Cantopop market, her new record ("Can 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 career seems settled smoothly.
She is the only Hong Kong singer to have been four times the recipient of the Hong Kong Best Female Singer award.