Anna May Wong(1905-1961)
- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, was born Wong Liu
Tsong on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California, to laundryman
Wong Sam Sing and his wife, Lee Gon Toy. A third-generation American,
she managed to have a substantial acting career during a deeply racist
time when the taboo against miscegenation meant that Caucasian
actresses were cast as "Oriental" women in lead parts opposite
Caucasian leading men. Even when the role called for playing opposite a
Caucasian in yellowface, as with
Paul Muni's as the Chinese peasant
Wang Lung in
The Good Earth (1937), Wong was
rejected, since she did not fit a Caucasian's imagined ideal look for
an Asian woman. The discrimination she faced in the domestic industry
caused her to go to Europe for work in English and German films. Her
name, which she also spelled Wong Lew Song, translates literally as
"Frosted Yellow Willows" but has been interpreted as "Second-Daughter
Yellow Butterfly." Her family gave her the English-language name Anna
May. She was born on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles in an
integrated neighborhood dominated by Irish and Germans, one block from
Chinatown, where her father ran the Sam Kee Laundry.
The Wong family moved back to Chinatown two years after Liu Tsong's
birth, but in 1910 they uprooted themselves, moving to a nearby
Figueroa Street neighborhood where they had Mexican and East European
neighbors. There were two steep hills between the Wongs' new home and
Chinatown, but as her biographer, Colgate University history professor
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, points out, those hills put a psychological
as well as physical distance between Liu Tsong and Chinatown. Los
Angeles' Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a
girl. She would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become
enraptured with the early "flickers." Though her traditional father
strongly disapproved of his daughter's cinephilia, as it deflected her
from scholastic pursuits, there was little he could do about it, as Liu
was determined to be an actress. The film industry was in the midst of
relocating from the East Coast to the West, and Hollywood was booming.
Liu Tsong would haunt movie shoots as she had earlier haunted the
nickelodeons. Her favorite stars were Pearl White, of
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
serial fame, and White's leading man,
Crane Wilbur. She was also fond of
Ruth Roland.
Educated at a Chinese-language school in Chinatown, she would skip
school to watch film shoots in her neighborhood. She made tip money
from delivering laundry for her father, which she spent on going to the
movies. Her father, if he discovered she had gone to the movies during
school hours, would spank her with a bamboo stick. Around the time she
was nine years old, she began begging filmmakers for parts, behavior
that got her dubbed "C.C.C." for "curious Chinese child."
Liu Tsong's first film role was as an uncredited extra in Metro
Pictures' The Red Lantern (1919),
starring Alla Nazimova as a Eurasian woman
who falls in love with an American missionary. The film included scenes
shot in Chinatown. The part was obtained for her by a friend of her
father's (without his knowledge) who worked in the movie industry.
Retaining the family surname "Wong" and the English-language
"Christian" name bestowed on her by her parents, Liu Tsong Americanized
herself as "Anna May Wong" for the movie industry, though she would not
receive an on-screen credit for another two years.
The rechristened Anna May Wong appeared in bit parts in movies starring
Priscilla Dean,
Colleen Moore and the
Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa, the first
Asian star of American movies. Due to her father's demands, she had an
adult guardian at the studio, and would be locked in her dressing room
between scenes if she was the only Asian in the cast. Initially
balancing school work and her budding film career, she eventually
dropped out of Los Angeles High School to pursue acting full time. She
was aided by the fact that, though still a teenager, she looked more
mature than her real age.
Director Marshall Neilan cast the
teenage Anna May in a bit part in his film
Dinty (1920), then gave her her first
credited role in the "Hop" sequence of
Bits of Life (1921), the American
movie industry's first anthology film. In "Hop" Wong played Toy Ling,
the abused wife of Lon Chaney's character
Chin Gow, which the Man of a Thousand Faces played in yellowface. She
next appeared in support of
John Gilbert in Fox's
Shame (1921) before being cast in her first
major role at the age of 17, the lead in
The Toll of the Sea (1922).
She played Lotus Flower in this adaptation of the opera "Madame
Butterfly," which moved the action from Japan to China. "The Toll of
the Sea" was the first feature film shot entirely in Technicolor's
two-strip color process. By appearing top-billed in this romantic
melodrama, Anna became the first native-born Asian performer to
star in a major Hollywood movie. Most portrayals of Asian women were
done by Caucasian actresses in "yellow-face," such as the 1915 Madame Butterfly (1915) starring
"America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford (who
was born in Toronto, Canada) in the title role. In "The Toll of the
Sea," Anna May's character perpetuates the stereotype of the Asian
"lotus blossom," a self-sacrificial woman who surrenders her life for
the love of a Caucasian man. The film was a hit, and it showcased Wong
in a preternaturally mature and restrained performance. This
breakthrough should have launched Anna May Wong as a star, but for one
thing: She was Chinese in a country that excluded (by law) Chinese
from emigrating to the US, that forbade (by law) Chinese from marrying
Caucasians and that generally excluded (by law or otherwise) Chinese from the culture at
large, except for bit roles as heavies in the national consciousness.
"The Toll of the Sea" made Anna May Wong a known, and thus a
marketable, commodity in Hollywood. She became the #1 actress when a
young Asian female part had to be cast, but unfortunately lead roles
for Asians were few and far between. Instead of becoming a star, this
beautiful woman with a complexion described as "a rose blushing through
old ivory" continued to be stuck in supporting roles, as in
Tod Browning's melodrama
Drifting (1923) and the western
Thundering Dawn (1923). She even
played an Eskimo in
The Alaskan (1924).
She appeared as Tiger Lily, "Chieftainess of the Indians," in
Paramount's prestigious production of
J.M. Barrie's
Peter Pan (1924), but the role was very
small (the film was shot on Santa Catalina Island, where the cast
stayed during the production.
The 170-cm-tall (5'7", although other sources cite her height as 5'4½")
beauty was known as the world's best-dressed woman and widely
considered to have the loveliest hands in the cinema. Her big
breakthrough after her auspicious start with "The Toll of the Sea"
finally came when
Douglas Fairbanks cast her in
a supporting role as a treacherous Mongol slave in his Middle
Eastern/Arabian Nights extravaganza
The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
The $2-million blockbuster production made her known to critics and the
movie-going public. For better or worse, a star, albeit of the
stereotypical "Dragon Lady" type, was born.
Despite her waxing fame, she was limited to supporting roles, as
Caucasian actresses, including most improbably
Myrna Loy, continued to be cast as Asian women
in lead roles from the 1920s through the 1940s, despite the ready
availability of Anna May Wong. She was unable to attract lead parts
despite her beauty and proven acting talent, even in films featuring
Asian women, but she did carve out a career as a supporting player in
everything from A-list movies to two-reel comedies and serials. The
characters she played typically were duplicitous or murderous vamps who
often reaped the wages of their sin by being raped. It was a demeaning
apprenticeship that most Caucasian actresses did not have to go
through. Anna wanted was to play modern American women all through her
career but was thwarted because of racism. Later, when she journeyed to
Europe to escape the typecasting of Hollywood, she told journalist
Doris Mackie, "I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it
that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a
villain--murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass."
Wong embodied the Caucasian ideal of a foreign exotic beauty, an alien
presence despite her American citizenship. The movie magazine
"Pictures" published a memoir of hers in 1926 in which she complained,
"A lot of people, when they first meet me, are surprised that I speak
and write English without difficulty. But why shouldn't I? I was born
right here in Los Angeles and went to the public schools here. I speak
English without any accent at all. But my parents complain that the
same cannot be said of my Chinese. Although I have gone to Chinese
schools, and always talk to my father and mother in our native tongue,
it is said that I speak Chinese with an English accent!". Many
Chinese-Americans considered themselves "Chinese in America," an
attitude bolstered by the anti-Chinese, anti-Asian attitude of the US
government and the American culture. In her memoir, Wong referred to
herself as "Chinese" or "Americanized Chinese," but not as an
"American" or "Chinese-American."
Anna May Wong appeared as a dancer in a play within a movie shot in
Technicolor for the Ronald Colman
vehicle
His Supreme Moment (1925), but
her Hollywood output generally was undistinguished. In 1926 she seems
to have appeared in a "race" film made by Chinese-Americans for a
Chinese-American audience,
The Silk Bouquet (1926) (aka "The Dragon Horse"). Moving between Poverty Row and the majors, she
appeared again with Lon Chaney in
Mr. Wu (1927) at MGM and with
Warner Oland and
Dolores Costello in
Old San Francisco (1927) at
Warner Brothers. Warners also cast her in support of Oriental yellowface
queen Myrna Loy in
The Crimson City (1928). Despite
her WASP looks and red hair, Loy in Chinese yellowface had become a major
"Oriental" star in American films desiring an exotic element. This
indignity may have been what pushed Wong to seek her future somewhere other than
Hollywood.
She moved to Europe in 1928, where she made movies in the UK and
Germany. She made her debut on the London stage with the young
up-and-coming Laurence Olivier in the
play "The Circle of Chalk." After receiving a drubbing for her voice
and singing from the London critics, she paid a Cambridge University
tutor to improve her speech, with the result that she acquired an
upper-crust English accent. Later she appeared in Vienna, Austria, in
the play "Springtime."
European directors appreciated Wong's unique talents and beauty, and
they used her in ways that stereotype-minded Hollywood, hemmed in
by American prejudice, would not or could not. Moving to Germany to
appear in German films, she became acquainted with German film
personalities, including
Marlene Dietrich and actress-filmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl. She learned German
and French and began to develop a continental European attitude and
outlook. In Europe she was welcomed as a star. According to her
biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Wong hobnobbed with "an
intellectual elite that included princes, playwrights, artists and
photographers who clamored to work with her." Anna May Wong was
featured in magazines all over the world, far more than actresses of a
similar level of accomplishment. She became a media superstar, and her
coiffure and complexion were copied, while "coolie coats" became the rage.
According to Hodges, "[S]he was the one American star who spoke to the
French people, more than Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford or Mary Pickford,
the top American actresses of the time." But, ironically, "[S]he's the
one who's now forgotten." Wong was cast in
Ewald André Dupont's silent film
Piccadilly (1929) as a maid who is
fired from her job at a London nightclub after dancing on top of a
table, then rehired as a dancer to infuse the club with exotic glamour.
Her first talkie was
The Flame of Love (1930) (aka "The Road to Dishonour", although some sources claim it was
"Song" aka "Wasted Love" in that same year), which was released by
British International Pictures. In a time before dubbing, when
different versions of a single film were filmed in different languages,
Wong played in the English, French and German versions of the movie.
Paramount Pictures offered her a contract with the promise of lead
roles in major productions. Returning to the US in 1930, Wong appeared
on Broadway in the play "On the Spot." It was a hit, running for
167 performances, and she moved on to Hollywood and Paramount,
where she starred in an adaptation of Sax Rohmer's novel "Daughter of
Fu Manchu" called
Daughter of the Dragon (1931).
She was back in stereotype-land, this time as the ultimate "Dragon
Lady," who with her father Fu Manchu (played by ethnic Swede Warner
Oland, the future Charlie Chan) embodied the evil "Yellow Peril." While
"Daughter of the Dragon" may have been B-movie pulp, it enabled Wong to
show off her talent by delivering a powerful performance.
Her best role in Hollywood in the early 1930s was in support of Marlene
Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's
Oscar-winning classic
Shanghai Express (1932).
However, Hollywood in the 1930s was as racist as it had been in the
Roaring Twenties, and MGM refused to cast her in its 1932 production of
The Son-Daughter (1932), for
which she did a screen-test, as she was "too Chinese to play a
Chinese." Helen Hayes played the
role in yellow-face. Similarly, she was later kept out of both a lead and
supporting role in MGM's prestige production of
The Good Earth (1937), its filming
of Pearl S. Buck's popular novel, after flunking another screen test for
failing to live up to a white man's idea of what "looked" Chinese. MGM
screen-tested her for the lead role of O-Lan, the sympathetic wife of
Chinese farmer Wang Lung (to be played by Paul Muni, personally cast in
the part by Irving Thalberg). She also
was considered for the supporting role of Lotus, Wang Lung's concubine.
Anna, an ethnic Chinese, lost out on both roles to two
Austrian women, Luise Rainer and
Tilly Losch, as
Albert Lewin, the Thalberg assistant who
was casting the film, vetoed Wong and other ethnic Chinese because
their looks didn't fit his conception of what Chinese people should
look like. Ironically, the year "The Good Earth" came out, Wong
appeared on the cover of Look Magazine's second issue, which labeled
her "The World's Most Beautiful Chinese Girl." Stereotyped in America
as a dragon lady, the cover photo had her holding a dagger. Luise
Rainer would win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance of O-Lan in
Chinese yellowface.
There were practical considerations for MGM's refusal to cast Wong
opposite Muni. It was illegal in many states, including California, for
Asians to marry Caucasians, and featuring an interracial
couple, even if they were playing the same race, likely would mean the
movie would be rejected by many theater chains in regions in which
anti-Asian prejudice was particularly severe, such as the South. The new Motion Picture
Production Code of 1934 forbid black/white miscegenation and MGM did cast Walter Connelly (a white actor) opposite Soo Yong (a Chines-American actress) as a married couple. Anna May returned to England, reportedly distraught at
the injustice perpetrated by MGM and her home country. In England she
alternated between films and the stage, but she was obliged to return
to the US to fulfill her Paramount contract. She appeared in two
Robert Florey-directed pictures,
Daughter of Shanghai (1937)
as a non-stereotypical Asian-American female lead, and
Dangerous to Know (1938). She
also appeared in major roles in
King of Chinatown (1939) and
Island of Lost Men (1939).
Anna May Wong did not appear in films from 1939-41, when she was cast
as a supporting player in
Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery (1941),
an entry in the B-movie series. Her last two starring roles in films were in a pair of anti-Japanese propaganda films,
Bombs Over Burma (1942) and
Lady from Chungking (1942),
both of which were made by Producers Releasing Corp., the lowest of the
Poverty Row studios. The major studios, when shooting propaganda films
requiring a sympathetic Asian lead, reverted to the old practice of
casting Caucasians in yellow-face, no matter how absurd the result.
As her movie career went into eclipse in the 1940s (she would not
appear in another motion picture until 1949), she found work on the
stage and in radio and then in the new medium of television. Wong wrote
a preface to the book "New Chinese Recipes" in 1942, which was one of
the first Chinese cookbooks printed in the US. The proceeds from the
cookbook were dedicated to United China Relief.
Though Wong was vocal in her opposition to stereotypes and typecasting,
and was one of Hollywood's more memorable victims of racism in being
denied leading roles in A-list pictures because the racist mores of the
times prevented an Asian woman from kissing a Caucasian actor, she was
considered socially suspect by her own people. The roles she was forced
to accept in order to have an acting career, as well as her status as a
single woman, disgusted many Chinese in America and in her ancestral
homeland, where actresses were equated with prostitutes and where women
were still played by men in classical opera. On a trip to China in
1936, Anna May was welcomed by the country's cultural elite in
cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai, but she had to abandon a trip to her
parents' ancestral village when her progress was blocked by a crowd of
protesters. Someone in the crowed denounced her with "Down with Huang
Liu Tsong, the stooge that disgraces China. Don't let her go ashore."
Upon her return from China, Wong was determined to play Chinese
characters more authentically, but her only options were to reject
roles she deemed racist or to try to soften them from within the belly
of the beast. Ultimately for this proud woman, it was a losing battle.
Chinese nationalism had been on the upswing since
Yat-sen Sun ended the Manchu Empire in 1911 and was
rife in reaction to the war of aggression launched against China by the
Empire of Japan. Chinese nationalists, concerned about the portrayal of
Chinese people as evil incarnate in American popular culture, were
offended by Wong's portrayals of Asians and exotics. Though she would
spend the World War II years working for Chinese charities and relief
agencies, she was snubbed by Madame Chiang, the sister-in-law of
Yat-sen Sun and wife of Kai-Shek Chiang, the army general who led the Nationalist
Chinese, during Madame Chiang's 1942-43 propaganda tour of the US. Her
biographer Hodges claims this was the beginning of a consensus among
Chinese and Chinese-Americans that Wong was an embarrassment. Chinese
and Chinese-Americans chose to blame her rather than Hollywood for the
demeaning stereotypes she had to play in order to work. The result of
this new consensus, according to Hodges, was that "her memory has been
washed away."
Anna May's career in motion pictures was virtually finished after the
war. She got her own TV series,
The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951),
on the Dumont Network, playing a Chinese detective in a role written
expressly for her, a character who was even given her real Chinese
name. The half-hour program, which ran weekly from August 27 to
November 21, 1951, was the first TV show to star an Asian-American.
Wong's personal relationships typically were with older Caucasian men,
but California law forbade marriage between Asians and Caucasians until
1948. One of her white lovers offered to marry her in Mexico, but the
couple's intentions became known and he backed off when his Hollywood
career was jeopardized. Wong mused about marrying a Chinese man at
times, but the Chinese culture held actresses to be on a par with
prostitutes, which made her suspect marriage material. She was afraid
that the mores of her culture likely meant that marrying a Chinese
would force her to quit her career and be an obedient wife.
Anna May Wong appeared in over 50 American, English and German films in
her career, making her the first global Chinese-American movie star.
She was forced to fight against racism and stereotyping all her
professional life, while simultaneously being criticized by Chinese at
home and abroad for perpetuating stereotypes in the media. Despite this
tremendous burden, the beautiful woman assayed an elegance and
sophistication on-screen that made her the paradigm of Asian women for
a generation of movie audiences.
Anna May Wong loved reading, and her favorite subjects spanned a wide
range, everything from Asian history and Tzu Lao
to William Shakespeare. She
never married but occupied her time with golf, horses, and skiing. Wong
smoked, drank too much, and suffered from depression. She was poised to
make a comeback as a character actress on the big screen toward the end
of her life, having appeared as
Lana Turner's maid in
Ross Hunter's sudsy potboiler
Portrait in Black (1960). She
was cast in the role of Madame Liang in
Flower Drum Song (1961), the
movie version of
Richard Rodgers's and
Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway
musical "Flower Drum Song," but before shooting could begin she passed
away.
Anna May Wong died of a massive heart attack on February 3, 1961, in
Santa Monica, CA, after a long struggle against Laennec's
cirrhosis, a disease of the liver. She was 56 years old. Her fame lives
on, four decades after her death. She is a part of American popular
consciousness, chosen as one of the first movie stars to be featured on
a postage stamp. And the interest in her continues: a
play about Anna entitled "China Doll--The Imagined Life of an American
Actress," written by Elizabeth Wong, had its premiere at Maine's
Bowdoin College in 1997. A lecture and film series, "Rediscovering Anna
May Wong," was held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2004,
sponsored by "Playboy" publisher
Hugh Hefner. That same year New York
City's Museum of Modern Art held its own tribute to Wong,
"Retrospective of a Chinese-American Screen Actress." Finally she was
getting the respect in her own country that was denied her during her
career.
A biography by Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao
Hodges, "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood
Legend," was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. Hodges considers
Anna May's life and career to be amazing, particularly in light of the
fact that her star has yet to be eclipsed by any other Asian-American
female star, despite the change in attitudes. Finally, in 2004, the
British Film Institute restored E.A. Dupont's 1929 silent film
"Piccadilly".
Tsong on January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California, to laundryman
Wong Sam Sing and his wife, Lee Gon Toy. A third-generation American,
she managed to have a substantial acting career during a deeply racist
time when the taboo against miscegenation meant that Caucasian
actresses were cast as "Oriental" women in lead parts opposite
Caucasian leading men. Even when the role called for playing opposite a
Caucasian in yellowface, as with
Paul Muni's as the Chinese peasant
Wang Lung in
The Good Earth (1937), Wong was
rejected, since she did not fit a Caucasian's imagined ideal look for
an Asian woman. The discrimination she faced in the domestic industry
caused her to go to Europe for work in English and German films. Her
name, which she also spelled Wong Lew Song, translates literally as
"Frosted Yellow Willows" but has been interpreted as "Second-Daughter
Yellow Butterfly." Her family gave her the English-language name Anna
May. She was born on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles in an
integrated neighborhood dominated by Irish and Germans, one block from
Chinatown, where her father ran the Sam Kee Laundry.
The Wong family moved back to Chinatown two years after Liu Tsong's
birth, but in 1910 they uprooted themselves, moving to a nearby
Figueroa Street neighborhood where they had Mexican and East European
neighbors. There were two steep hills between the Wongs' new home and
Chinatown, but as her biographer, Colgate University history professor
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, points out, those hills put a psychological
as well as physical distance between Liu Tsong and Chinatown. Los
Angeles' Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a
girl. She would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become
enraptured with the early "flickers." Though her traditional father
strongly disapproved of his daughter's cinephilia, as it deflected her
from scholastic pursuits, there was little he could do about it, as Liu
was determined to be an actress. The film industry was in the midst of
relocating from the East Coast to the West, and Hollywood was booming.
Liu Tsong would haunt movie shoots as she had earlier haunted the
nickelodeons. Her favorite stars were Pearl White, of
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
serial fame, and White's leading man,
Crane Wilbur. She was also fond of
Ruth Roland.
Educated at a Chinese-language school in Chinatown, she would skip
school to watch film shoots in her neighborhood. She made tip money
from delivering laundry for her father, which she spent on going to the
movies. Her father, if he discovered she had gone to the movies during
school hours, would spank her with a bamboo stick. Around the time she
was nine years old, she began begging filmmakers for parts, behavior
that got her dubbed "C.C.C." for "curious Chinese child."
Liu Tsong's first film role was as an uncredited extra in Metro
Pictures' The Red Lantern (1919),
starring Alla Nazimova as a Eurasian woman
who falls in love with an American missionary. The film included scenes
shot in Chinatown. The part was obtained for her by a friend of her
father's (without his knowledge) who worked in the movie industry.
Retaining the family surname "Wong" and the English-language
"Christian" name bestowed on her by her parents, Liu Tsong Americanized
herself as "Anna May Wong" for the movie industry, though she would not
receive an on-screen credit for another two years.
The rechristened Anna May Wong appeared in bit parts in movies starring
Priscilla Dean,
Colleen Moore and the
Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa, the first
Asian star of American movies. Due to her father's demands, she had an
adult guardian at the studio, and would be locked in her dressing room
between scenes if she was the only Asian in the cast. Initially
balancing school work and her budding film career, she eventually
dropped out of Los Angeles High School to pursue acting full time. She
was aided by the fact that, though still a teenager, she looked more
mature than her real age.
Director Marshall Neilan cast the
teenage Anna May in a bit part in his film
Dinty (1920), then gave her her first
credited role in the "Hop" sequence of
Bits of Life (1921), the American
movie industry's first anthology film. In "Hop" Wong played Toy Ling,
the abused wife of Lon Chaney's character
Chin Gow, which the Man of a Thousand Faces played in yellowface. She
next appeared in support of
John Gilbert in Fox's
Shame (1921) before being cast in her first
major role at the age of 17, the lead in
The Toll of the Sea (1922).
She played Lotus Flower in this adaptation of the opera "Madame
Butterfly," which moved the action from Japan to China. "The Toll of
the Sea" was the first feature film shot entirely in Technicolor's
two-strip color process. By appearing top-billed in this romantic
melodrama, Anna became the first native-born Asian performer to
star in a major Hollywood movie. Most portrayals of Asian women were
done by Caucasian actresses in "yellow-face," such as the 1915 Madame Butterfly (1915) starring
"America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford (who
was born in Toronto, Canada) in the title role. In "The Toll of the
Sea," Anna May's character perpetuates the stereotype of the Asian
"lotus blossom," a self-sacrificial woman who surrenders her life for
the love of a Caucasian man. The film was a hit, and it showcased Wong
in a preternaturally mature and restrained performance. This
breakthrough should have launched Anna May Wong as a star, but for one
thing: She was Chinese in a country that excluded (by law) Chinese
from emigrating to the US, that forbade (by law) Chinese from marrying
Caucasians and that generally excluded (by law or otherwise) Chinese from the culture at
large, except for bit roles as heavies in the national consciousness.
"The Toll of the Sea" made Anna May Wong a known, and thus a
marketable, commodity in Hollywood. She became the #1 actress when a
young Asian female part had to be cast, but unfortunately lead roles
for Asians were few and far between. Instead of becoming a star, this
beautiful woman with a complexion described as "a rose blushing through
old ivory" continued to be stuck in supporting roles, as in
Tod Browning's melodrama
Drifting (1923) and the western
Thundering Dawn (1923). She even
played an Eskimo in
The Alaskan (1924).
She appeared as Tiger Lily, "Chieftainess of the Indians," in
Paramount's prestigious production of
J.M. Barrie's
Peter Pan (1924), but the role was very
small (the film was shot on Santa Catalina Island, where the cast
stayed during the production.
The 170-cm-tall (5'7", although other sources cite her height as 5'4½")
beauty was known as the world's best-dressed woman and widely
considered to have the loveliest hands in the cinema. Her big
breakthrough after her auspicious start with "The Toll of the Sea"
finally came when
Douglas Fairbanks cast her in
a supporting role as a treacherous Mongol slave in his Middle
Eastern/Arabian Nights extravaganza
The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
The $2-million blockbuster production made her known to critics and the
movie-going public. For better or worse, a star, albeit of the
stereotypical "Dragon Lady" type, was born.
Despite her waxing fame, she was limited to supporting roles, as
Caucasian actresses, including most improbably
Myrna Loy, continued to be cast as Asian women
in lead roles from the 1920s through the 1940s, despite the ready
availability of Anna May Wong. She was unable to attract lead parts
despite her beauty and proven acting talent, even in films featuring
Asian women, but she did carve out a career as a supporting player in
everything from A-list movies to two-reel comedies and serials. The
characters she played typically were duplicitous or murderous vamps who
often reaped the wages of their sin by being raped. It was a demeaning
apprenticeship that most Caucasian actresses did not have to go
through. Anna wanted was to play modern American women all through her
career but was thwarted because of racism. Later, when she journeyed to
Europe to escape the typecasting of Hollywood, she told journalist
Doris Mackie, "I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it
that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a
villain--murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass."
Wong embodied the Caucasian ideal of a foreign exotic beauty, an alien
presence despite her American citizenship. The movie magazine
"Pictures" published a memoir of hers in 1926 in which she complained,
"A lot of people, when they first meet me, are surprised that I speak
and write English without difficulty. But why shouldn't I? I was born
right here in Los Angeles and went to the public schools here. I speak
English without any accent at all. But my parents complain that the
same cannot be said of my Chinese. Although I have gone to Chinese
schools, and always talk to my father and mother in our native tongue,
it is said that I speak Chinese with an English accent!". Many
Chinese-Americans considered themselves "Chinese in America," an
attitude bolstered by the anti-Chinese, anti-Asian attitude of the US
government and the American culture. In her memoir, Wong referred to
herself as "Chinese" or "Americanized Chinese," but not as an
"American" or "Chinese-American."
Anna May Wong appeared as a dancer in a play within a movie shot in
Technicolor for the Ronald Colman
vehicle
His Supreme Moment (1925), but
her Hollywood output generally was undistinguished. In 1926 she seems
to have appeared in a "race" film made by Chinese-Americans for a
Chinese-American audience,
The Silk Bouquet (1926) (aka "The Dragon Horse"). Moving between Poverty Row and the majors, she
appeared again with Lon Chaney in
Mr. Wu (1927) at MGM and with
Warner Oland and
Dolores Costello in
Old San Francisco (1927) at
Warner Brothers. Warners also cast her in support of Oriental yellowface
queen Myrna Loy in
The Crimson City (1928). Despite
her WASP looks and red hair, Loy in Chinese yellowface had become a major
"Oriental" star in American films desiring an exotic element. This
indignity may have been what pushed Wong to seek her future somewhere other than
Hollywood.
She moved to Europe in 1928, where she made movies in the UK and
Germany. She made her debut on the London stage with the young
up-and-coming Laurence Olivier in the
play "The Circle of Chalk." After receiving a drubbing for her voice
and singing from the London critics, she paid a Cambridge University
tutor to improve her speech, with the result that she acquired an
upper-crust English accent. Later she appeared in Vienna, Austria, in
the play "Springtime."
European directors appreciated Wong's unique talents and beauty, and
they used her in ways that stereotype-minded Hollywood, hemmed in
by American prejudice, would not or could not. Moving to Germany to
appear in German films, she became acquainted with German film
personalities, including
Marlene Dietrich and actress-filmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl. She learned German
and French and began to develop a continental European attitude and
outlook. In Europe she was welcomed as a star. According to her
biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Wong hobnobbed with "an
intellectual elite that included princes, playwrights, artists and
photographers who clamored to work with her." Anna May Wong was
featured in magazines all over the world, far more than actresses of a
similar level of accomplishment. She became a media superstar, and her
coiffure and complexion were copied, while "coolie coats" became the rage.
According to Hodges, "[S]he was the one American star who spoke to the
French people, more than Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford or Mary Pickford,
the top American actresses of the time." But, ironically, "[S]he's the
one who's now forgotten." Wong was cast in
Ewald André Dupont's silent film
Piccadilly (1929) as a maid who is
fired from her job at a London nightclub after dancing on top of a
table, then rehired as a dancer to infuse the club with exotic glamour.
Her first talkie was
The Flame of Love (1930) (aka "The Road to Dishonour", although some sources claim it was
"Song" aka "Wasted Love" in that same year), which was released by
British International Pictures. In a time before dubbing, when
different versions of a single film were filmed in different languages,
Wong played in the English, French and German versions of the movie.
Paramount Pictures offered her a contract with the promise of lead
roles in major productions. Returning to the US in 1930, Wong appeared
on Broadway in the play "On the Spot." It was a hit, running for
167 performances, and she moved on to Hollywood and Paramount,
where she starred in an adaptation of Sax Rohmer's novel "Daughter of
Fu Manchu" called
Daughter of the Dragon (1931).
She was back in stereotype-land, this time as the ultimate "Dragon
Lady," who with her father Fu Manchu (played by ethnic Swede Warner
Oland, the future Charlie Chan) embodied the evil "Yellow Peril." While
"Daughter of the Dragon" may have been B-movie pulp, it enabled Wong to
show off her talent by delivering a powerful performance.
Her best role in Hollywood in the early 1930s was in support of Marlene
Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's
Oscar-winning classic
Shanghai Express (1932).
However, Hollywood in the 1930s was as racist as it had been in the
Roaring Twenties, and MGM refused to cast her in its 1932 production of
The Son-Daughter (1932), for
which she did a screen-test, as she was "too Chinese to play a
Chinese." Helen Hayes played the
role in yellow-face. Similarly, she was later kept out of both a lead and
supporting role in MGM's prestige production of
The Good Earth (1937), its filming
of Pearl S. Buck's popular novel, after flunking another screen test for
failing to live up to a white man's idea of what "looked" Chinese. MGM
screen-tested her for the lead role of O-Lan, the sympathetic wife of
Chinese farmer Wang Lung (to be played by Paul Muni, personally cast in
the part by Irving Thalberg). She also
was considered for the supporting role of Lotus, Wang Lung's concubine.
Anna, an ethnic Chinese, lost out on both roles to two
Austrian women, Luise Rainer and
Tilly Losch, as
Albert Lewin, the Thalberg assistant who
was casting the film, vetoed Wong and other ethnic Chinese because
their looks didn't fit his conception of what Chinese people should
look like. Ironically, the year "The Good Earth" came out, Wong
appeared on the cover of Look Magazine's second issue, which labeled
her "The World's Most Beautiful Chinese Girl." Stereotyped in America
as a dragon lady, the cover photo had her holding a dagger. Luise
Rainer would win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance of O-Lan in
Chinese yellowface.
There were practical considerations for MGM's refusal to cast Wong
opposite Muni. It was illegal in many states, including California, for
Asians to marry Caucasians, and featuring an interracial
couple, even if they were playing the same race, likely would mean the
movie would be rejected by many theater chains in regions in which
anti-Asian prejudice was particularly severe, such as the South. The new Motion Picture
Production Code of 1934 forbid black/white miscegenation and MGM did cast Walter Connelly (a white actor) opposite Soo Yong (a Chines-American actress) as a married couple. Anna May returned to England, reportedly distraught at
the injustice perpetrated by MGM and her home country. In England she
alternated between films and the stage, but she was obliged to return
to the US to fulfill her Paramount contract. She appeared in two
Robert Florey-directed pictures,
Daughter of Shanghai (1937)
as a non-stereotypical Asian-American female lead, and
Dangerous to Know (1938). She
also appeared in major roles in
King of Chinatown (1939) and
Island of Lost Men (1939).
Anna May Wong did not appear in films from 1939-41, when she was cast
as a supporting player in
Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery (1941),
an entry in the B-movie series. Her last two starring roles in films were in a pair of anti-Japanese propaganda films,
Bombs Over Burma (1942) and
Lady from Chungking (1942),
both of which were made by Producers Releasing Corp., the lowest of the
Poverty Row studios. The major studios, when shooting propaganda films
requiring a sympathetic Asian lead, reverted to the old practice of
casting Caucasians in yellow-face, no matter how absurd the result.
As her movie career went into eclipse in the 1940s (she would not
appear in another motion picture until 1949), she found work on the
stage and in radio and then in the new medium of television. Wong wrote
a preface to the book "New Chinese Recipes" in 1942, which was one of
the first Chinese cookbooks printed in the US. The proceeds from the
cookbook were dedicated to United China Relief.
Though Wong was vocal in her opposition to stereotypes and typecasting,
and was one of Hollywood's more memorable victims of racism in being
denied leading roles in A-list pictures because the racist mores of the
times prevented an Asian woman from kissing a Caucasian actor, she was
considered socially suspect by her own people. The roles she was forced
to accept in order to have an acting career, as well as her status as a
single woman, disgusted many Chinese in America and in her ancestral
homeland, where actresses were equated with prostitutes and where women
were still played by men in classical opera. On a trip to China in
1936, Anna May was welcomed by the country's cultural elite in
cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai, but she had to abandon a trip to her
parents' ancestral village when her progress was blocked by a crowd of
protesters. Someone in the crowed denounced her with "Down with Huang
Liu Tsong, the stooge that disgraces China. Don't let her go ashore."
Upon her return from China, Wong was determined to play Chinese
characters more authentically, but her only options were to reject
roles she deemed racist or to try to soften them from within the belly
of the beast. Ultimately for this proud woman, it was a losing battle.
Chinese nationalism had been on the upswing since
Yat-sen Sun ended the Manchu Empire in 1911 and was
rife in reaction to the war of aggression launched against China by the
Empire of Japan. Chinese nationalists, concerned about the portrayal of
Chinese people as evil incarnate in American popular culture, were
offended by Wong's portrayals of Asians and exotics. Though she would
spend the World War II years working for Chinese charities and relief
agencies, she was snubbed by Madame Chiang, the sister-in-law of
Yat-sen Sun and wife of Kai-Shek Chiang, the army general who led the Nationalist
Chinese, during Madame Chiang's 1942-43 propaganda tour of the US. Her
biographer Hodges claims this was the beginning of a consensus among
Chinese and Chinese-Americans that Wong was an embarrassment. Chinese
and Chinese-Americans chose to blame her rather than Hollywood for the
demeaning stereotypes she had to play in order to work. The result of
this new consensus, according to Hodges, was that "her memory has been
washed away."
Anna May's career in motion pictures was virtually finished after the
war. She got her own TV series,
The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951),
on the Dumont Network, playing a Chinese detective in a role written
expressly for her, a character who was even given her real Chinese
name. The half-hour program, which ran weekly from August 27 to
November 21, 1951, was the first TV show to star an Asian-American.
Wong's personal relationships typically were with older Caucasian men,
but California law forbade marriage between Asians and Caucasians until
1948. One of her white lovers offered to marry her in Mexico, but the
couple's intentions became known and he backed off when his Hollywood
career was jeopardized. Wong mused about marrying a Chinese man at
times, but the Chinese culture held actresses to be on a par with
prostitutes, which made her suspect marriage material. She was afraid
that the mores of her culture likely meant that marrying a Chinese
would force her to quit her career and be an obedient wife.
Anna May Wong appeared in over 50 American, English and German films in
her career, making her the first global Chinese-American movie star.
She was forced to fight against racism and stereotyping all her
professional life, while simultaneously being criticized by Chinese at
home and abroad for perpetuating stereotypes in the media. Despite this
tremendous burden, the beautiful woman assayed an elegance and
sophistication on-screen that made her the paradigm of Asian women for
a generation of movie audiences.
Anna May Wong loved reading, and her favorite subjects spanned a wide
range, everything from Asian history and Tzu Lao
to William Shakespeare. She
never married but occupied her time with golf, horses, and skiing. Wong
smoked, drank too much, and suffered from depression. She was poised to
make a comeback as a character actress on the big screen toward the end
of her life, having appeared as
Lana Turner's maid in
Ross Hunter's sudsy potboiler
Portrait in Black (1960). She
was cast in the role of Madame Liang in
Flower Drum Song (1961), the
movie version of
Richard Rodgers's and
Oscar Hammerstein II's Broadway
musical "Flower Drum Song," but before shooting could begin she passed
away.
Anna May Wong died of a massive heart attack on February 3, 1961, in
Santa Monica, CA, after a long struggle against Laennec's
cirrhosis, a disease of the liver. She was 56 years old. Her fame lives
on, four decades after her death. She is a part of American popular
consciousness, chosen as one of the first movie stars to be featured on
a postage stamp. And the interest in her continues: a
play about Anna entitled "China Doll--The Imagined Life of an American
Actress," written by Elizabeth Wong, had its premiere at Maine's
Bowdoin College in 1997. A lecture and film series, "Rediscovering Anna
May Wong," was held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2004,
sponsored by "Playboy" publisher
Hugh Hefner. That same year New York
City's Museum of Modern Art held its own tribute to Wong,
"Retrospective of a Chinese-American Screen Actress." Finally she was
getting the respect in her own country that was denied her during her
career.
A biography by Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao
Hodges, "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood
Legend," was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. Hodges considers
Anna May's life and career to be amazing, particularly in light of the
fact that her star has yet to be eclipsed by any other Asian-American
female star, despite the change in attitudes. Finally, in 2004, the
British Film Institute restored E.A. Dupont's 1929 silent film
"Piccadilly".