Global Courant
Hong Kong-born American singer Coco Lee passed away on Wednesday at the age of 48, Lee’s two sisters, Carol and Nancy Lee, said in a statement posted on Instagram and Facebook.
Lee died in a hospital in Hong Kong after a suicide attempt on July 2 that left her in a coma, according to her sisters.
“Although Coco sought professional help and did her best to battle depression, unfortunately the demon in her got the better of her,” the statement said.
“Despite the best efforts of the hospital team to rescue and treat her from her coma, she ultimately passed away on July 5, 2023,” the statement said.
Lee’s career spanned about 30 years. Among her most notable performances have been voicing the female warrior Mulan in the Mandarin version of Disney’s Mulan and performing the Oscar-nominated song A Love Before Time from the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
LOOK | Coco Lee’s A Love Before Time:
Fandoms in Asia and the US
Born in Hong Kong in 1975, she was the youngest of three children of a Hong Kong Cantonese mother and Malaysian father.
Coco Lee smiles with husband Bruce Rockowitz during their wedding banquet at Shaw Studio in Hong Kong on Oct. 28, 2011. (Kin Cheung/The Associated Press)
Lee’s father died before she was born, and by the age of 9, her mother had moved Lee and her sisters to the United States, to San Francisco.
After graduating from high school in 1992, she was offered a recording contract in Hong Kong with Capital Artists, which eventually led her to leave her studies at the University of California, Irvine to focus on her music career.
In 1996, Lee signed with Sony Music Entertainment and her debut album, Coco Lee, became the best-selling album of that year in Asia.
It didn’t take long for Lee to gain fans in both Asia and the United States, beginning her path to new collaborations and English-language songs.
She recorded 18 studio albums and appeared in three films, most notably Li Xin’s Master of Everything and Stanley Kwan’s No Tobacco.
In 2011, Lee married Bruce Rockowitz, a Canadian businessman who is the former CEO of Hong Kong supply chain company Li & Fung. He survives her, as do her sisters and two stepdaughters.
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