Anita Yuen

At the age of 18, Yuen won the Miss Hong Kong. She also took home the award for Miss Photogenic. The following year, Yuen represented Hong Kong in the 1991 Miss Chinese International pageant, ultimately finishing at first runner up. She represented Hong Kong at the Miss Universe 1991 pageant in Las Vegas.

David Bordwell noted that in Hong Kong beauty pageants, particularly Miss Hong Kong, was a breeding ground for future star actresses such as Yuen to emerge.

Yuen's first film role was a bit part in Blackie Ko's film The Days of Being Dumb (1992). For her performance, she won Best New Performer at the 12th Hong Kong Film Awards.

Yuen is best known for her role as the female lead in Derek Yee's 1993 tear-jerker C'est la vie, mon chéri (1993). She is also well-remembered in her cross-gender comic role opposite Leslie Cheung in He's a Woman, She's a Man (1994). The two roles won for her the Hong Kong Academy Best Actress awards. She also gave a powerful performance in, for instance, The Chinese Feast, co-starring together with Leslie Cheung. Apart from her role in a great many films, she has also acted in a number of Mainland-Taiwan television serials, such as Hua Mu Lan, opposite Vincent Zhao.

Her husband is Hong Kong actor and singer Julian Cheung. In May 2006, Yuen announced that she was 3 months pregnant with their first child. Their son, Morton Cheung, was born on November 12, 2006. On June 23, 2007, Yuen was a guest on TVB's Be My Guest with host Stephen Chan revealing that she and Julian were secretly married in Shibuya City, Japan, back in 2001. Anita had finally revealed in early 2021 that after she gave birth to Morton, she and her husband Julian attempted to have a second child first through natural conception with desire for their son Morton to have a little brother or sister, however this attempt failed as Anita's natural increasing age was an antithetical factor.

Anita and Julian then agreed to try In vitro fertilisation using sperm extracted from Julian's collected preserved semen to impregnate Anita, but after multiple procedural attempts, the attempted pregnancy was unsuccessful and they eventually gave up on the attempt.