Born:
January 3,
1905, in
Los Angeles, CA;
birth name Wong Liu Tsong (Wang Liu Cong), which means
Golden Willow.
America's first
Chinese-American star. She overcame
the odds to become a movie
actress, one celebrated by the magazines as a stunning beauty with a
complexion like a
rose blushing through
ivory--and yet never achieved the
heights of contemporary
Caucasian actresses. Her role choices were frequently limited because of her
ethnicity--almost
one hundred years later,
Asian-American actors note that things haven't really changed. Anna May Wong may be the
only true
Asian American star thus far.
Anna May Wong was born in the
LA Chinatown to an
immigrant Chinese family who owned a
laundry.
Independent-minded from
childhood, she took advantage of her family's
middle class status and her own status as
favorite daughter to thwart her
parents' attempts at raising her
traditionally.
Fascinated by
film at an early age, Anna May managed to get a part in a
1919 movie called
The Red Lantern, at the age of
fourteen. Though her
father disapproved, she had found her
calling, and first got her name into the
credits in
1921.
As a
young woman, Anna May was thoroughly
beautiful by anyone's
standards, and
gracefully
tall for the time. She went on to make many films, though she was often passed over for the
lead in favor of poorly
Orientalized actresses such as
Myrna Loy. Anna May knew there was
prejudice and
stereotyping working against her, and frequently flat refused to play the
maidservant and
evil mistress roles she was offered if they were too
demeaning to
Chinese women. Over the years, she worked alongside performers such as
Marlene Dietrich,
Lon Chaney,
Douglas Fairbanks,
Mary Pickford,
Lana Turner, and others. She not only survived the move to
talkies, but was in the very first two-strip
Technicolor film ever made.
However, by the time she was
23, Anna May was tired of being treated as another piece of
Chinoiserie novelty. She moved to
Europe and was in films and
plays there for three years, then got her shot at the Dietrich film. That was the height of her
fame, although she had her own
TV show in the
1950s, about a lady antique collector who solved
mysteries.
Never married, Anna May Wong died in
1961. Although she was truly a striking
beauty, popular in
glamour photography of her young days, she is nearly forgotten today. To see photos of her, go to "http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/PhotoGallery/wong.htm" and "http://silent-movies.com/Ladies/PWong1.html" ... to read her own words from a
film magazine feature article from
1926, see "http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/FeaturedStar/star49e.htm"