~Anna May Wong~

Born: January 3, 1905 in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Died: February 2, 1962 in Santa Monica, CA, USA  
Schmutziges Geld (1928) .... Song
... aka Show Life
... aka Song (UK)
... aka Wasted Love
Chinatown Charlie (1928) .... Mandarin's Sweetheart
Across to Singapore (1928) (uncredited) .... Singapore Woman ... Movie Still Code: 354-X
The Crimson City (1928) .... Su
Streets of Shanghai (1927) .... Su Quan
The Devil Dancer (1927) .... Sada
The Chinese Parrot (1927) .... Nautch Dancer
Why Girls Love Sailors (1927) (scenes deleted) .... Delamar
Old San Francisco (1927) .... A Flower of the Orient
The Honorable Mr. Buggs (1927) .... Baroness Stoloff
Mr. Wu (1927) .... Loo Song
Driven from Home (1927)
The Desert's Toll (1926) .... Oneta
The Silk Bouquet (1926) .... Dragon Horse
... aka The Dragon Horse
A Trip to Chinatown (1926) .... Ohati
Fifth Avenue (1926) .... Nan Lo ... Movie Still Code: 240-X
His Supreme Moment (1925) .... Harem Girl in play
Forty Winks (1925) .... Annabelle Wu
Peter Pan (1924) .... Tiger Lily
The Alaskan (1924) .... Keok
The Fortieth Door (1924) .... Zira
... aka The 40th Door
The Thief of Bagdad (1924) .... The Mongol Slave
Lilies of the Field (1924)
Thundering Dawn (1923) .... Honky-Tonk Girl
Drifting (1923) .... Rose Li
The Toll of the Sea (1922) .... Lotus Flower
Bits of Life (1921) .... Toy Sing, Chin Chow's Wife
Shame (1921) .... Lotus Blossom
The First Born (1921)
Outside the Law (1920) (uncredited) .... Chinese Girl
Dinty (1920) (uncredited)
The Red Lantern (1919) (uncredited)
~Silent Filmography~
~The Los Angeles Times, 1961~
Born in Los Angeles to traditional Chinese parents in 1905, Anna May Wong's star-struck
ambition and her svelte good looks coincided with a taste for Oriental exotica on stage and
screen in the U.S. and in Europe in the '20s and the '30s.

She was the first Asian movie star in the West, and her career spanned four decades, bridging
the silent films to talkies, and even venturing onto stage and into early television. Wong was a
woman in the right place at the right time.

Her career rose meteorically, yet she would find it hard to escape the crater of stereotyping into
which she too easily tripped.

Wong was one of seven children born in a Los Angeles combination flat and laundry. She
attended Hollywood High School.

She scored her first big-screen success opposite Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in "Thief of Baghdad"
(1924), establishing the stardom that she held from the silent era into the early 1940s.

Although she typified the slinky Oriental siren in scores of movie intrigues, Wong did not visit
China until 1936, where she remained for a year to absorb the Chinese culture.

After retiring from film life in 1947, she returned to the big screen in 1959 when she starred in
"Portrait in Black."

In recent years several of her films have been beautifully restored — including "Piccadilly"
(1929), which was Wong's last silent film and one in which she plays a cheeky scullery maid
who becomes the glittering headliner at a swank London nightclub. In this and countless other
films, she does her obligatory Oriental-style shimmy, here a concoction with Thai and Balinese
flavors, in a scanty Oriental-style costume while desire-filled white men look on.

"For a good 10 years she received top billing, she was a huge international star," says Mimi
Brody, who programmed a UCLA film series on Wong's work. "For an Asian American actress
there's no comparison for the scope of her career."

— Scarlet Cheng in the Los Angeles Times, with additional Times material January 4, 2004 and
Feb. 4, 1961
.