Google remembers Anna May Wong , the first Chinese actress who became an American movie star in the 1920s, with a doodle. Born in Los Angeles on January 3, 1905, Anna May Wong had the merit of being the first to open American screens to a non-Caucasian, becoming a symbolic actress of the Sino-American community. And it was no small feat. ( ANSA CINEMA CARD )
The film is The Red Lantern (1919) with Alla Nazimova, one of those meatloafs on the mysterious East, so popular in both Hollywood and Berlin in those years. Three hundred Chinese people holding red lanterns in their hands must parade in front of the camera: among these is little Wong Liu, fourteen years old. It is the first time of her who will become better known as Anna May Wong, a few years later, when, at the age of eighteen, she will impersonate the Mongolian slave in a film that will have great success, The Thief of Baghdad (1924), with a wild Douglas Fairbanks. For the first time, a Chinese actress became an absolutely selective American movie star, where yellows, blacks, Indians, but also the "latins", many times, were relegated to marginal roles, and generally depicted negative characters.
After the film with Fairbanks, which introduced Anna across the ocean, the actress played an Eskimo in The Alaskan (1924); in Peter Pan (1924) she was Tiger Lily, Indian chief-tribe, while in Forty Winks (1925) she was a seductive oriental vamp. Although forced into films where the characters, Chinese or Japanese who were, had fallen into stories of a cloying exoticism, Anna had an intense cinematographic activity, even if limited to the role of antagonist.
