Anna May Wong

Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood and the first to receive international recognition. Born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles, her career spanned silent films, sound films, stage, television, and radio. Her first role was as an extra in the movie The Red Lantern (1919). During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first films made in color, and in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Wong was considered a fashion icon, and in 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the “world’s best dressed woman.”

She left Hollywood because of ongoing discrimination and moved to Europe, where she starred in many plays and films, including Schmutziges Geld (1928), Piccadilly (1929), and her first talking film The Flame of Love (1930). She also starred in the operetta Tschun Tschi and in the play A Circle of Chalk with Laurence Olivier. When Wong returned to the United States, she starred in the Broadway production of On the Spot. Always asked to play stereotypical Asian roles, she accepted a role in Daughter of the Dragon, but this opened the way for her most famous film, Shanghai Express (1932). During World War II, she devoted her time and money to help the Chinese cause against Japan.

Wong returned again to the United States in the 1950s and became the first Asian American to star in a U.S. television show, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong. In 1960, Wong became the first Asian American woman to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She appeared in more than sixty movies. Through her films, public appearances, and magazine features, she helped to humanize Chinese Americans to mainstream American audiences during a period of intense racism and discrimination.