Word: actresses
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...resume would be impressive enough for a caucasian actress. It happened that Anna May Wong was Chinese, at a time when East Asians were no more likely to become Hollywood stars than someone from India or Africa. She knew, from seeing The Perils of Pauline serials with the villainous Wu Fang, or D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, about a sensitive, opium-sotted "Chink," that Chinese were portrayed in films as notorious criminals or emotional cripples, and that, anyway, they were almost always played by white actors. Hollywood may as well have had a sign on the studio gate reading...
...magnitude of Wong's achievement is not that she was Hollywood's first star actress of Chinese blood. It is that, for her entire, 40-plus years in movies, and for decades after, she was the only one. Lucy Liu, from Queens, has achieved a little fame on the small and big screens; the Mainland's Zhang Ziyi, soon to star (as a Japanese!) in Bob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha, may duplicate her Asian luminosity. But Wong was the No. 1 Chinese lady, from the teens to the 60s, and there was no No. 2. Against devastating odds...
...Prodded by the Circle of Chalk embarrassment, Wong paid #200 for a speech teacher, who implanted a mid-Atlantic accent that the actress would use from then on. What didn't change was the flatness. She had a deep alto voice, with a cello's rich knowing, melancholy, but it was a monotone; it didn't climb or fall with the musicality most actors adopt. Her tonal range was one of the narrowest in talking pictures, and that limited her emotional range. She rarely giggled or shrieked; her voice suggested that she was either disdainful or incapable of severe highs...
...poles of Wong's screen appeal were that she was nonchalantly sexual (in many films the slim-chested actress wears no bra, thus allowing viewers to ogle at what Sanney Leung on the invaluable Hong Kong Entertainment News in Review website refers to as "two points") and vaguely forbidding. Hollywood couldn't ignore her allure, and had taken notice of her stardom in Europe. Finally, in 1931, at 26, she got top billing in her first American talkie, director Lloyd Corrigan's Daughter of the Dragon - which, in its unabashed melodramatic excess, its rampaging ethnic stereotypes and the opportunity...
...Ross Hunter production Portrait in Black, this time supporting Anthony Quinn, who had done small roles in her late-30s Paramount films. Now he was the famous name and she the filler. (Also in 1960, Quinn starred as an Inuit in Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents - opposite another actress, Marie Yang, who in this film was billed as Anna May Wong! It may be the only instance of an actor appearing with two actresses of the same name in the same year...