By virtue of at least being Chinese (though she was born in Los Angeles' Chinatown), actor & style icon Anna May Wong was one of the few touches of authenticity in
Orientalisme product from early Hollywood. She was a striking, elegant presence in such opium-laced, ornately-designed fare as
Daughter of the Dragon,
Daughter of Shanghai,
Toll of the Sea & Josef von Sternberg's deliriously exotic
Shanghai Express (1932). In the sprawling British silent masterpiece
Picadilly (1929), Wong showed she could be just as scintillating in a striped tennis sweater as in body-hugging silk & a two-storey deco headpiece. As an underage girl, the actor entered a love affair with director Tod Browning, a relationship that managed to remain a secret for an unusually long time by Hollywood standards. While the public & filmmakers may have been fickle about Anna May Wong, she was silver-dusted catnip for the elegant celebrity photographers of the day, including Carl Van Vechten, Lotte Jacobi, Arthur Kales, Otto Dyar, Paul Tanqueray, Edwin Hesser & Nikolas Murray. Easily one of the most beautiful & seductive women to ever appear on screen, it's a shame she's not mentioned in the same breath as Garbo, Harlow & Norma Shearer, though this does seem to be changing thanks to some fervent missionary work on the part of film scholars, repertory film theater programmers & understandably devoted bloggers. Wong died of a heart attack in her Santa Monica home on February 3, 1961. She was only 56-years-old.
