Anna May Wong (Spotlight #2)

[kitty]

Anna May Wong
(Spotlight #2)

Nominated by Shuriken

Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu-Tsong (or Wong Lew Song, as she sometimes wrote it) on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California. She attended the old Los Angeles High School and a Chinese-language school in Chinatown. Despite the disapproval of her traditionally-minded parents, she aspired to become an actress at an early age. She would play hooky from Chinese school to watch movies being shot whenever a production was filming on location in Chinatown, and her fascination with this sight cemented her determination to become a movie star. In 1918, when Liu-Tsong was only 13-years-old, a friend of her father's who worked in the motion-picture industry invited her (without her father's knowledge) to audition for the role of an extra in the movie "The Red Lantern." She won her first film role, and though it was small, it affirmed her acting ambitions. After balancing more movie work with school, the teenager eventually dropped out of her studies to pursue acting full-time.

Taking the name Anna May Wong -- a name that she chose for herself -- the persistent Chinese American performer continued to scrape out supporting roles in the silent movies. Her early credits included THE FIRST BORN (1921), starring the Japanese-born leading man Sessue Hayakawa, and BITS OF LIFE (1921), opposite "the man of a thousand faces," Lon Chaney, who played her Chinese husband. Although she was still a teenager, Anna May looked mature for her years.
Her big break came in 1922, when she was cast in the top-billed lead role in THE TOLL OF THE SEA, a romantic melodrama. At the tender age of 17, Anna May Wong became the first U.S.-born Asian American performer to star in a major Hollywood feature. Although Sessue Hayakawa and his Japanese-born wife, Tsuru Aoki, had previously starred in their own productions, Anna May's achievement marked the emergence of a home-grown Asian American talent into the entertainment industry.

By today's standards, THE TOLL OF THE SEA is disappointing because Anna May is compelled to affirm the pervasive stereotype of the "lotus blossom": the self-sacrificial Asian woman who gives her life for the love of a white man -- never a man of any other race. This stereotype was defined by the opera MADAME BUTTERFLY. In fact, THE TOLL OF THE SEA is merely the story of MADAME BUTTERFLY transplanted to China (just as the recent stage musical MISS SAIGON is MADAME BUTTERFLY transplanted to Vietnam), and Anna May played the Chinese "Butterfly." Nevertheless, for the first time in a major Hollywood movie, an Asian American actress headed the cast and held the spotlight. This was quite an accomplishment considering that Hollywood's few other Asian female leads at the time (except in Tsuru Aoki's infrequent films) were played by white actresses in "yellowface." Just a few years before, in 1915, a movie version of MADAME BUTTERFLY had been made -- with Mary Pickford, "America's sweetheart," in the title role.

more...

Filmography:
1960 Portrait in Black - Character played: Tani
1949 Impact - Character played: Su
1943 Lady from Chungking - Character played: Kwan Mei
1942 Bombs over Burma - Character played: Lin Ying
1941 Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery - Character played: Lois Ling
1939 Island of Lost Men - Character played: Kim Ling
1939 King of Chinatown - Character played: Dr. Mary Ling
1938 Dangerous to Know - Character played: Mme. Lan Ying
1938 When Were You Born? - Character played: Mary Lee Ling
1937 Daughter of Shanghai - Character played: Lan Ying Lin
1935 Java Head - Character played: Taou Yen
1934 Chu Chin Chow - Character played: Zahrat
1934 Limehouse Blues - Character played: Tu Tuan
1933 A Study in Scarlet - Character played: Mrs. Pyke
1933 Tiger Bay - Character played: Lui Chang
1932 Shanghai Express - Character played: Hue Fei
1931 Daughter of the Dragon - Character played: Ling Moy
1930 Hello Everybody
1930 Wasted Love
1930 Hai-Tang - Character played: Hai-Tang
1930 The Flame of Love - Character played: Hai Tang
1929 Piccadilly - Character played: Shosho
1928 Across to Singapore
1928 Chinatown Charlie
1928 The Crimson City - Character played: Su
1928 Schmutziges Geld
1927 Mr. Wu - Character played: Loo Song
1927 Chinese Parrot - Character played: Nautch Dancer
1927 Driven from Home
1927 Old San Francisco - Character played: Chinese Girl
1927 Streets of Shanghai
1926 Trip to Chinatown
1926 Silk Bouquet
1926 The Desert's Toll - Character played: Oneta
1926 Fifth Avenue
1925 Forty Winks - Character played: Annabelle Wu
1925 His Supreme Moment
1924 The 40th Door
1924 The Thief of Baghdad - Character played: The Mongol Slave
1924 The Fortieth Door - Character played: Mariam
1924 The Alaskan - Character played: Keok
1924 Peter Pan - Character played: Tiger Lily
1923 Drifting - Character played: Rose Li
1923 Thundering Dawn
1923 Mary of the Movies
1922 The Toll of the Sea - Character played: Lotus Flower
1921 Bits of Life - Character played: Toy Sing, Chin Chow's Wife
1921 Shame - Character played: The Lotus Blossom
1920 Dinty

source

Resources:
http://annamaywong.com/index.htm

[kitty]

Anna May Wong played many stereotypical roles, but she was also a pioneering actor, one of the first Asian Americans on screen during a time when movies was still a revolutionary invention (and predominantly for the rich)...

Given our discussion on B.D. Wong, do you think Anna May Wong represents a pioneer or a 'sell-out'? Do you think the era in which she was a star makes a difference?

[KATANA]

I do think that Anna May Wong represents a pioneer eventhough the characters that she played were stereotypical. At least she got to play them instead of some white lady with yellow make-up.

[Faithless]

A dragon lady and cultural warrior

...
Though glamorous and alluring, did Wong merely embody the racist stereotypes of a studio system that still has trouble imagining a positive role for Asians? Riding a wave of interest in early cinema and all things Asian, two recent biographies - Anthony Chan's "Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong" and Graham Russell Gao Hodges's "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend" - argue otherwise.
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Wong, these authors contend, worked hard to make even her smallest roles as Chinese as possible, using authentic hairstyles and costumes (frequently drawn from her own extensive collection). Generations later, only a handful of Asian or Asian-American actresses - Nancy Kwan, Maggie Cheung, Lucy Liu - have even begun to approach Wong's success in the West.
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Now, long after being relegated to the precincts of camp and the margins of film history, she is being celebrated with the U.S. rerelease of her erotic triumph as Shosho in the 1929 British silent "Picadilly." Her eclectic elegance, both on and off screen, is exerting a renewed influence on fashion.
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The American couture designer Maggie Norris cites Wong's dazzling fusion of classical Chinese dress and 1930's Hollywood chic as an inspiration for her spring 2004 collection.
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And the two new biographies, along with the filmography "Anna May Wong," by Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane, attempt to sort out Wong's baffling mixture of proto-feminist strengths and come-hither exoticism.
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Born Wong Liu Tsong (or Frosted Yellow Willow) in 1905, above her family's Chinese laundry in Los Angeles, Wong caught the movie bug early. She became known as the "curious Chinese child" who hung around the set whenever films were shot in Chinatown.
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At 17 she captured her first starring role, in the 1922 silent "Toll of the Sea." The screenwriter, Frances Marion, stole the plot of "Madame Butterfly" for this tale of an American washed up on Chinese shores who seduces and deserts a virginal young woman. In a touching performance, Wong's quiet dignity and her expressive use of Chinese dress and gesture brought substance to her role as Lotus Flower.
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Her big break came when Hollywood's golden boy, Douglas Fairbanks, cast her in his over-the-top Orientalist extravaganza, "The Thief of Baghdad" (1924). Wong's bikini-clad Mongol slave girl betrays her mistress, a wan Persian princess and Fairbanks's love interest, by spying for a Mongol prince. The scene-stealing Wong shudders and writhes before Fairbanks's knife sensationally.
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That epic brought her international renown, but at home she soon found her talents consigned to supporting parts adding "Oriental intrigue" or local color, while Caucasian actors made up in "yellow face" (like the Swedish-born Warner Oland, who starred in the Charlie Chan detective series) were routinely cast in leading roles as Asians.
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Taboos against mixed-race love prevented Wong from playing romantic leads, since she couldn't kiss her co-stars, or doomed her seductresses to death.
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Frustrated with instructing "yellow face" performers like Myrna Loy in the use of chopsticks, in 1928 Wong left Hollywood for Europe, where she led the cosmopolitan life, starring in film, theater and opera and hobnobbing with the cultural elite in three languages. A photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstadt at the Berlin Press Ball of 1929 shows Wong, Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl: three young actresses looking for a break, before the political cataclysm that would divide their world.
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In "Picadilly," directed by E.A. Dupont and filmed in London, she upstaged Gilda Gray, the "Queen of Shimmy," as Shosho, the scullery maid who catches the eye of Gray's lover, a nightclub impresario; he puts her onstage as a dancer, and she becomes an overnight sensation. Perhaps it had something to do with her costume - a scanty, gilded interpretation of a vaguely Indonesian warrior outfit, purchased (at Shosho's insistence) in Limehouse, London's Chinatown. More likely it was Wong's intensity, toughness and vibrant sensuality, showcased in a film that played off the fears and temptations of miscegenation.
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"Her movies are almost always a representation of social fears about interracial sex, and her own inner turmoil on the subject," said the Wong biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, a professor of history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. In 1932, he notes, she wrote a remarkably frank article for the French periodical Revue Mondiale on the problems involved in mixed-race marriages.
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Wong never wed, though gossip linked her romantically with several Caucasian directors and (most scandalously) with Dietrich, whose sexual appetites were legendary. (In the 1930's, as Wong continued to shuttle between Europe and Hollywood, she told fan magazines that she hoped to marry a traditional Chinese scholar, though her radical independence made the likelihood of such a union remote.)
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In 1936, seeking to increase the authenticity of her depictions of Chinese women and hoping to find her spiritual homeland, Wong set off on an 11-month visit to China.
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Though officially she was received with full honors, her reception was mixed.
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Chinese critics had long castigated the roles she accepted (often women of loose morals) as insulting to the national character; the fact that she frequently performed bare-legged was itself cause for scandal.
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Nevertheless, Wong's two biographers emphasize her tireless activity on behalf of Chinese causes in the years leading up to and during World War II. In 1956 her home movies of her visit to her family's ancestral village in China were shown on American television; her commentary cited the trip as her most satisfying achievement.
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Like many actors of her generation, Wong ended her professional life in the infant medium of television. Briefly she starred in "The Gallery of Madame Liu Tsong," about a Chinese picture dealer and detective who becomes embroiled in international art world intrigue.
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Her final publicity still, from "Portrait in Black" (1960), the film she hoped would revive her career, shows her clutching a Siamese cat in her role as a maid; her face, though still beautiful, displays the ravages of the liver disease that would kill her one year later.
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She had made more than 60 films. My favorite (among those I've seen) is "Java Head," an obscure 1934 British production and a resolutely B-effort by the director J. Walter Ruben. (Wong loved it, perhaps because it was the one film in which her co-star kissed her.) It's saved by her extraordinary performance as Taou Yuen, a Manchu princess who marries the son of a Bristol shipping magnate (John Loder) and accompanies him back to England.
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As she arrives by surprise in his family's salon, elaborately made-up, bejewelled and coiffed in a chrysanthemum headdress, his prim Victorian relations gape as if confronted with a creature from another planet. Little did they know that this splendid personage came from a world that she alone inhabited.
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The New York Times NEW YORK On film, the screen goddess Anna May Wong was fond of saying, she died a thousand deaths. As Lotus Flower, an innocent Hong Kong girl abandoned by her feckless American lover, she threw herself into the roiling ocean; as Shosho, the London flapper and "Chinese Dancing Wonder," she was shot in the chest by a jealous suitor; as Taou Yuen, an exquisite Qing Dynasty princess transported to humdrum Victorian Bristol, she ate opium while arrayed in spectacular Peking Opera costume.
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Once in a while, her characters survived. In Josef von Sternberg's "Shanghai Express" (1932) she plays Hui Fei, an inordinately graceful Confucian courtesan with nerves of steel (and traveling companion to Marlene Dietrich's notorious prostitute Shanghai Lily), who disappears from a crowded train platform amid the flashes of news photographers after collecting her reward for murdering a brutal Chinese warlord. But that was rare. Her faithless servants, gangsters' molls and dragon ladies - the parts Hollywood tended to reserve for her - generally came to no good.
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Though glamorous and alluring, did Wong merely embody the racist stereotypes of a studio system that still has trouble imagining a positive role for Asians? Riding a wave of interest in early cinema and all things Asian, two recent biographies - Anthony Chan's "Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong" and Graham Russell Gao Hodges's "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend" - argue otherwise.
.
Wong, these authors contend, worked hard to make even her smallest roles as Chinese as possible, using authentic hairstyles and costumes (frequently drawn from her own extensive collection). Generations later, only a handful of Asian or Asian-American actresses - Nancy Kwan, Maggie Cheung, Lucy Liu - have even begun to approach Wong's success in the West.
...
(Three pages long.)

"Frustrated with instructing "yellow face" performers like Myrna Loy in the use of chopsticks, in 1928 Wong left Hollywood for Europe..."

Sad that this is what it took to make it for some, like Josephine Baker.

[hooligan]

she's hot, she really is. have you seen any of her movies. if she wasn't dead, i'd want to do her.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by hooligan

she's hot, she really is. have you seen any of her movies. if she wasn't dead, i'd want to do her.

Aren't you at UCLA?

Nobody's Lotus Flower: "Rediscovering Anna May Wong" Film Retrospective

[hooligan]

Originally Posted by ChottoMatte

Aren't you at UCLA?

Nobody's Lotus Flower: "Rediscovering Anna May Wong" Film Retrospective

yes, i saw picadilly's with bonsai!

[Faithless]

From Anna May Wong to Lucy Liu

Dragon lady, lotus blossom, seductress. Asian-American actress Anna May Wong played all the Asian stereotypes during her film career, which began more than 80 years ago, during the silent film era. More often than not, the characters she portrayed were killed, by either murder or suicide. In today's Hollywood, Lucy Liu, arguably the only bankable Asian-American star working in films today, manages to survive most of her films – is this the only progress that has been made?


Wong's choice of roles was limited by what Hollywood studios were offering her at the time. In the early 20th century, anti-miscegenation laws were still in effect in the U.S., including California's 1880 law that prohibited issuing marriage licenses for white and Chinese couples as well as black and white couples. The 1930 production code stated, "Miscegenation (sex relationship between the white and black races) is forbidden." Even kissing was not allowed. The law remained in effect until 1948 – by which time Wong has essentially retired from films. Eventually, she became so frustrated with the limited roles available to her that she left Hollywood in 1928 to go to Europe for three years, making films in England, Germany and France, and appearing in stage productions. "I think I left Hollywood because I died so often," Wong said.


Wong had a remarkable career, acting in more than 80 films over a 23-year period, successfully making the transition from the silent to the sound era. Forty-three years after her death in 1961, Anna May Wong is undergoing a revival of sorts. Retrospectives of her work were presented earlier this year at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. In addition, two biographies have been published, Anthony Chan's Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (Roman & Littlefield, 2003) and Graham Hodges' Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).


Four of Wong's films screened in the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival in March. In The Toll of the Sea, a 1922 silent film, 17-year-old Wong played her first starring role as Lotus Flower. Despite a moving performance, her character's inevitable decisions – telling her son she is not his mother, but rather his Chinese nanny and giving him up to her white lover and his white wife and then Lotus Flower's eventual suicide – are frustrating. The Madame Butterfly self-sacrificing storyline overshadowed the beauty of the film – it was one of the first Technicolor productions. After The Toll of the Sea, Wong was offered some supporting roles and lost leading Asian roles to white actresses in yellowface. It is no wonder that she left for Europe.


In the 1929 British silent film Picadilly, Wong's character Shosho is a scullery maid turned successful nightclub dancer. In this film, Wong had a starring role. Sadly, her on-screen kiss with her white co-star was cut by the British censors and her character is eventually killed. In Shanghai Express, released in 1932 and starring Marlene Dietrich, Wong has a supporting role as a prostitute who is raped by the Eurasian leader of the revolutionaries. In Daughter of Shanghai, released in 1937, she stars as the adventurous Chinese American Lan Yin Lin who is searching for the smuggling ring responsible for the death of her father. She works with an Asian American government agent, played by Asian American actor Philip Ahn. In the film, he eventually asks her to marry him – but they do not kiss on screen. So even when she is with an Asian man, she is still not allowed any real romance. But at least her character is not killed.


How far have Asian American actresses come since then? Unfortunately, not very far. In U.S. cinema today, only one Asian American actress seems to be working regularly – Lucy Liu.


Is the situation really that bad? None of the actresses in The Joy Luck Club are working in mainstream Hollywood films, not unless you count Ming-Na as the voice of Mulan in Disney's animated film Mulan and its upcoming sequel. Certainly, more than one Asian American actress should be working steadily, starring or co-starring in films. The 2000 U.S. Census states that 4.2 percent of the population reported themselves as Asian and 3.6 percent identified themselves as only Asian. But if the Screen Actors Guild employment statistics are any indication, Hollywood still has a long way to go. According to SAG's 2002 casting report, Asian/Pacific Islanders were cast in 2.4 percent of all roles in theatrical productions, no change from the previous year. When will Hollywood's casting of Asians will reflect the percentage of Asians living in the U.S.? At this no-growth rate, it may take decades before the casting catches up with the population.


So, does Lucy Liu or any other Asian-American actress have any more options than Anna May Wong did in film? Let's take a look at some of the roles Liu has played since she launched a film career in the late '90s. She has played a dominatrix in Mel Gibson's Payback; a kidnapped Chinese princess in Jackie Chan's Shanghai Noon; a detective in the Charlie's Angels fluff films, co-starring with Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz; a secret agent in action flick Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, co-starring with Antonio Banderas; and a supporting role as the leader of the yakuza in Kill Bill, which stars Uma Thurman – not exactly a wide range of roles during Liu's brief film career. But as she has said in an interview, "I don't have many options right now. You create options for yourself so that you have more opportunities later. ..."


Although Liu's film characters usually survive by the end of the film – unlike Anna May Wong's – they do not have much opportunity for romance, or if romance exists as it does in Charlie's Angels, it has been with a white guy, not an Asian one. So, Liu is taking what Hollywood is offering her. As an actress, she wants to work so she takes what is available and tries to do the best that she can with those roles.


Although Liu's roles may not have done much to dismantle the dragon lady stereotype, is it fair to expect her to represent all Asian American women? Or that every role she takes refutes a stereotype? She is an actress trying to make a living.


When Liu made a name for herself as the seemingly heartless lawyer Ling Woo on television's Ally McBeal, she was accused by some Asian Americans of perpetuating the dragon lady stereotype. However, she has also been credited with helping to demolish the submissive, eager-to-please Asian woman stereotype. As an actress, her position is somewhat similar to Anna May Wong's but without the additional restrictions about interracial romance. The bottom line is, if Liu's films do not make money, then it will be difficult for her to sustain a career and eventually get the clout to play more interesting roles – roles that go beyond stereotypes.


The Charlie's Angels films each made more than $100 million domestically, but Liu's 2002 film Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever tanked at the box office. The film's budget was an estimated $70 million and it made less than $15 million in its U.S. theatrical release. Liu shared top billing with Antonio Banderas, which doesn't say much for their combined box office appeal. With Charlie's Angels, the success of the films could easily be attributed Liu's white co-stars. Liu has third billing, behind Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore.


As a movie star, Lucy Liu is not yet Anna May Wong's equivalent but her film career is still in its early stages and her popularity seems to be rising. In 2000, Liu became the first Asian American to host Saturday Night Live. She has co-starred in a few big-budget films. However, she has yet to open a film with her name above the title – the true endorsement of Hollywood. She still needs to prove her box office appeal and get a decent script. If her career has some longevity, perhaps the door will open a little wider so more Asian-American film actresses can break through. But the fact remains – no Asian-American actress has had a career that has lasted as long as Anna May Wong's and she died more than 40 years ago. Let's hope that will soon change.

[Faithless]

The eyes of a stranger

Anna May Wong was the only truly glamorous Asian-American movie star from the early years in Hollywood. A film retrospective, biographies and upcoming documentary reveal her fascinating life, LIAM LACEY writes

By LIAM LACEY
Friday, June 4, 2004 - Page R7

Charlie Chan was a Swede. The famous Chinese detective of the thirties and forties, was played by Stockholm-born Johan Verner Olund, shortened to Warner Olund. Olund also played the evil criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu, as did Boris Karloff. At various times, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Mickey Rooney, Fred Astaire; Myrna Loy, Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando all performed in "yellow face," taping their eyelids back and putting on accents to seem to Chinese or Japanese.

There was one Asian-American truly glamorous movie star from the early years in Hollywood. Her name was Anna May Wong (1905-1961) a third-generation Los Angeles native, who has become a long-time cult figure for her beauty and cool, contained sexuality. She is probably best remembered as Marlene Dietrich's sidekick in Shanghai Express (1932) and though she made more than 50 films, Wong's career suffered because of racist strictures, often being turned down for Asian roles that went to her white colleagues.

Recently, she has been rediscovered in a big way. Three new biographies have been written about her, there's a documentary film in the works. She also the subject of a major touring retrospective organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which begins at Toronto's Cinematheque Ontario tonight.One of seven children who lived above their father's laundry business, Wong Liu-Tsong was fascinated by movies as a child. She attended Hollywood High in the heart of the movie district and found work as a background player and photographer's model in her early teens. At 17, she was cast in her first starring role in the blockbuster, The Toll of the Sea (1922), a reworking of Madame Butterfly about an Asian girl named Lotus Flower, loved and then abandoned by an American sailor. It is mainly of interest as a handsome early example of two-strip Technicolor process. Subsequently, Douglas Fairbanks picked her for a role in The Thief of Bagdad (as a Mongolian slave girl) in 1924 and she played Tiger Lily in a production of Peter Pan the same year. But she was limited in the roles that were offered her, and after losing an supporting Asian part to Myrna Loy in The Crimson City (1928) she decided to try her luck in Europe, where she spent three years.

"I was tired of the parts I had to play," she said." Why is it that on the screen the Chinese are always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain -- murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass " She left Hollywood, she said "because I died so often. I was killed in virtually every picture in which I appeared."

Her triumph from the European period is the late silent film, Picadilly (1929) by acclaimed German director E.A. Dupont (who made expressionist classic Variety). Set in a London dance club, the film is the study of a sordid showbiz love triangle. With the print tinted in yellow (for day and indoors) and blue for outdoor evening shots, it's a visually lush (beautifully restored by the British Film Institute) film with the camera tracking around the nightclub set and another set of a nearby Limehouse slum.

Wong, kohl-eyed and wearing a Louise Brooks-style hairdo, plays Shosho, the scullery maid who is first seen performing a sensual tabletop dance in torn stockings for the rest of the kitchen staff. She is fired by the boss of Club Piccadilly but then rehired to become the star of the show. The old star (Gilda Gray) is abandoned by her lover and turns vengeful, leading to Wong's murder yet again.

Back in Hollywood in the talkies era,, having taken speech lessons to shed her California accent for something more mid-Atlantic sounding, Wong entered the talkie era with more femme fatale/dragon-lady roles. Typical of the kind of tripe was Daughter of the Dragon. Wong plays, yet again, an exotic dancer, who discovers one evening that she is the daughter of the evil criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu (Warner Olund), who is on a mission to destroy the family of General Petrie. Shortly after she meets her father for the first time, he dies (a very long death scene) and she vows to carry out the vendetta against the Petrie family, even as she falls for the son she set out to seduce and destroy. Though a pantomime of evil -- "No love! No jealousy! Just merciless vengeance!" -- she remains the only compelling aspect of the film.

In 1936, she was asked to screen test for the only villainous role in The Good Earth, the adaptation of Pearl Buck's novel about Chinese peasant life. Wong was incredulous: "You're asking me -- with my Chinese blood -- to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture, featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters."

There was no question of her playing the lead, O-Lan (both the role and that year's Oscar went to Vienna-born Luise Rainer), because actor Paul Muni (cast as the Chinese peasant Wang Lung) was actually white, and the new Motion Picture Code did not allow scenes of interracial relationships.

In the mid-thirties, Wong went to China for 10 months, where she did relief work and was feted by officials of the Nationalist government, though the Hollywood roles she played were openly condemned as demeaning to Chinese people. She returned to America to star in the smartly entertaining B-movie thriller Daughter of Shanghai (1937). Lan Ying Lin is the daughter of a prosperous San Francisco businessman. When her father is murdered by gangsters smuggling illegal immigrants to the United States, she decides to track down his killers on a Caribbean island in a sleazy dancehall bar (more sensual dancing scenes for Wong). Finally, in league with a Chinese-American immigration cop (Philip Ahn), she sets things right. Her final major film, Dangerous to Know, which gives the retrospective its title, sees Wong as a kept woman of an L.A. gangster.

As well as onscreen restrictions, Wong was not even allowed to own property in Beverly Hills because she was Asian. Racism also affected her domestic happiness. Wong never married, though the media attempted to link her with Asian-American co-stars such as Philip Ahn and Sessue Hayakawa (Daughter of the Dragon). She had relationships with Caucasian men but because of miscegenation laws that lasted in California until 1949, she was never able to marry one of them.

Wong went into semi-retirement in the 1940s, though she was the first Asian-American host of a television show, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, in 1951. In the late fifties, she began to suffer from ill health, both cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism and heart problems, but after a ten-year hiatus she did two final parts in films in 1960, as Lana Turner's maid in Portrait in Black, and as an Inuk in Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents. She had been cast as the matriarch in the musical comedy, Flower Drum Song, adapted from a hit Broadway musical, but before the film was made she died of a heart attack in 1961 at 56.

Dangerous to Know: The Films of Anna May Wong runs from tonight until June 16. All screenings are at Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W, Toronto.

[Shuriken]

ANNA MAY WONG