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.
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