Chinese actresses dream of Hollywood

Across the ocean, the history of the film industry has been rewritten.

On March 12, local time, the 95th Academy Awards ceremony came to an end. The movie "Instantaneous Universe" received a total of 11 nominations at this year's Oscars, and was finally awarded 7 awards including Best Picture and Best Director, and starring Michelle Yeoh won the Best Actress Award.

This moment broke history - this was the first Chinese and even Asian actress to win the award.

Prior to this, Michelle Yeoh has won the Golden Globe Award, the American Critics Association Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award and other awards for Best Actress for "Instantaneous Universe", and is a well-deserved big winner of this year's North American film awards season.

Over the past hundred years, among all the Chinese actresses who have broken through Hollywood, Michelle Yeoh is a key figure in carrying on the upper and lower, and the image of "beating women" she opened broadened the path of Chinese actresses in Hollywood, and finally proved her acting skills with a fantasy drama, and the hard work of her predecessors also bore fruit on her.

But on another level, the supreme recognition from the North American film industry may not be as important as it once was. For the whole of last year, China's annual box office of US$4.33 billion, its share of the total global box office slipped to second place compared with 2020 and 2021, still 17%, second to North America (including the United States and Canada) at 29%, a position that has actually been firmly maintained for more than 10 years.

Once Hollywood was a utopian dream hall for Chinese stars, which stemmed from its strong star-making ability and global commercial influence, now the foundation of utopia is no longer unbreakable, and the dream of Chinese actresses in a foreign land may also become the swan song of history.

"The Chinese on screen is always the bad guy"

Last October, actor Huang Liu Shuang was engraved on a 25-cent coin. One side of the coin belongs to the founding president of the United States, George Washington, and the other side belongs to the first Chinese Hollywood movie star. At the same time, this is also the first time that an Asian face has appeared on the US dollar.

The Director of the U.S. Mint said: "This coin is intended to reflect the breadth and depth of Huang Willow's achievements as she overcame the challenges and obstacles she faced throughout her life. In the era when Huang Liu Shuang was active on the big screen, her achievements were not recognized, and challenges and obstacles were everywhere.

Huang Liu Shuang was born in Chinatown in the early 20th century and is a third-generation Chinese immigrant. At school, classmates sitting behind her would prick her with needles just to see if Chinese felt pain.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 openly recognized the racial discrimination against Chinese in American society, and until the thirties of the last century, when Hollywood adapted Pearl Buck's novels "Earth" and "Dragon Species", even if the characters were Chinese, they preferred to use makeup and stunts to cast white people. This oppressive external atmosphere runs through Huang Liushuang's growth stage and even his entire acting career.

At the age of 14, Huang Liushuang appeared in the movie "Red Lantern" as a dragon set, and the audience and critics looked at Chinese faces that had never been seen before with horror, and there were even reports with "Yellow Peril! China Invasion Screen" as the title. Three years later, she won an important role in "The Sea Passes", the film itself tells the tragedy of a pair of Eastern and Western lovers who cannot fall in love, there is a scene where a man kisses a girl and the girl avoids shyly, which was designed because actors of different races were forbidden to kiss on the screen at that time.

At the age of 19, Huang Liushuang played a Mongolian slave girl in "The Thief of Baghdad" and was the second villain in the film. The film cost $1.13 million, the production specifications were at the forefront of the 1920s, and Huang Liu Shuang's appearance is quite symbolic: combed in two ringed buns, wearing tight clothing, except for the chest and hips are almost naked, like a symbol of erotic with exotic evil.

Huang Liu Shuang's image in "The Thief of Baghdad"

The image of a poisonous snake licking her thigh was printed as a movie poster, and Huang Liu Shuang also became the cover girl of the magazine with this scene. "The Thief of Baghdad" then sold out, Huang Liushuang's fame was almost limited to death, and images such as slave girls and prostitutes frequently appeared in her subsequent works.

Not only that, Huang Liushuang's character always dies, and she once complained: "Dying pitifully seems to have become my unique job." After 13 years from the film, she played the first role in "Shanghai Express" who lived until the end of the movie.

In a way, Huang Willow Frost is passive. At that time, what Hollywood needed was only a sense of curiosity that conformed to the imagination of the East, so highly ritualized costumes such as hair buns and cheongsam were very common in early Chinese actresses, and the character types were mostly embellishment small characters or villains.

Huang Liu Shuang's image in Hollywood

When Huang Liu Shuang left Hollywood in 1928, he also asked: "Why is it that on the screen Chinese there are always some bad guys, villains, and some extremely cruel villains - murder, cunning, a poisonous snake hiding in the grass... Our civilization is older than the West, how can we be like that? ”

Huang Liu Shuang faced not only racial discrimination in the United States, but also doubts from his homeland. Against the background of the anti-Japanese war in full swing in the 40s, Song Meiling refused to meet with Huang Liushuang during her visit to the United States. Her films were introduced into China, and most audiences found it difficult to accept her screen image of betraying her hue and vilifying Chinese. A Shanghai reporter once asked her "why do you want to play so many humiliating oriental women", she replied: "If I don't play those roles, and there are other white people to play, I will lose the only opportunity to 'Chinese play Chinese'." ”

As a pioneer, Huang Liushuang's experience is also like two sides of the coin, the front is that she broke through the ethnic blockade of Hollywood, so that Chinese people also have the opportunity to become international stars with the help of the developed film industry, and she herself left the Chinese name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for the first time. On the contrary, since her, Hollywood has set a performance template for Chinese actresses, either helpless beauties waiting to be saved, or dark and degenerate deadly witches, in short, on the basis of "exotic" to perform erotic seduction is the pass to enter Hollywood.

Zhou Caiqin is another actress representative who achieved great success in the Western world in the early days. She was born in Tianjin to a Peking Opera family, and Chen Miao, the director of the biopic "Shanghai's Daughter" who made her a personal biopic in 1959, recalled that "this drama was successfully staged and detonated the whole of Europe, making her a super celebrity in the theater industry." New York and London lit up signs with her name on them, and theaters were packed. "The drama tells the love story between an English youth and a Chinese prostitute.

"The World of Susie Yellow" is on the sign

Hollywood threw an olive branch to her, and Zhou Caiqin became the first Chinese "Bond girl", appearing in the commercial blockbuster "007 Thunder Valley", and the role setting is still a dusty woman. Later, she also played Fu Manchu's daughter several times in the "Fu Manchu" series - Fu Manchu's image is from the novel of the British writer, and is itself an anthropomorphic image of the "Yellow Peril Theory".

Zhou Caiqin's second half of her life also starred in the first all-Asian lineup "Joy Luck Club", "Shocking Demon Bandits" series, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", Netflix version of "Three-Body Problem", etc., as an actor's personal achievements are unquestionable, but in a specific era background can not get rid of Hollywood's restrictions on Chinese actresses.

The international breakthrough of Chinese actresses

"The exotic elements that Hollywood can embrace are what it imagines. If your stuff goes beyond that, it's not acceptable. Hollywood has its own box, and you have to fit that box. Actor Chen Chong once concluded.

With the emergence of the "overseas tide" in the late 70s, a group of Chinese actresses began to try to take the road of internationalization, and Chen Chong was one of them. Compared with their predecessors, they have stronger Chinese characteristics, and Chen Chong has already won the Best Actress Award for "Little Flower" before going abroad.

After being discovered by Italian producers, her first film "Taipan " still has some revealing fragrant pictures. During the filming of "The Last Emperor", due to a scene mistake accidentally dew points, she asked the director to write a letter of guarantee not to use the lens before continuing to work. "The Last Emperor" is world-renowned and a turning point in Chen Chong's international career, and she subsequently became a film queen in Australia, Israel, Yugoslavia and other countries.

The Last Emperor

But to prove himself in the cracks left by Hollywood for Chinese actors, Chen Chong has not had an easy time, describing 1981 and 1991 on his blog as the darkest and most uncertain period of his life. Because she didn't feel very valuable, she began to turn to directing Hollywood movies such as "Autumn in New York", which was also a breakthrough for Chinese actresses.

Compared to Chen Chong's single-handedness, there is another "international breakthrough" route. With the rise of the fifth generation of directors in the 90s and winning the top prizes at the three major European film festivals, there are also a group of actresses who were absorbed into Hollywood because of the attention of the Western world for starring in local films, and Gong Li is the representative of this route.

Gong Li's impression of the West has improved to a certain extent, and the scholar Pei Kairui believes that "she is not only portrayed as an object of desire, but also a provocateur." Although the screen image is still associated with lust, the status has changed from passive to active initiator, which was also widely regarded at the time as showing the sexual liberation power of women, coupled with the exotic factor, "arousing the already tired appreciation of Western male audiences."

Michelle Yeoh, who was born in Malaysia and first received the influence of the Hong Kong film industry, is different. Before her, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and others had sown the seeds of Chinese kung fu to Hollywood, and Michelle Yeoh broke the convention of binding kung fu to Chinese male stars, opening up a new way for actresses to enter Hollywood.

In 1995, when Michelle Yeoh was filming "The Story of Akin", she fell from a 6-meter-high rooftop, and she seemed to feel her body folded in half and her legs hit the back of her head. The seriousness of the accident once made her doubt about her main kung fu acting line, and began to think "why should I do this, is it worth it". Director Quentin Tarantino happened to be in Hong Kong at the time, and when he went to visit Michelle Yeoh in the hospital, Quentin said "I've seen all your movies" and told his favorite action scenes frame by frame. Michelle Yeoh later recalled that the conversation "brought her to life."

Two years later, Michelle Yeoh played a Chinese female agent in "007: Tomorrow's Empire", making her Hollywood debut as a star. Before filming, a staff member comforted her that "you are making a Bond movie, just enjoy yourself", but Michelle Yeoh still decided to take the role seriously. This 007 movie did break the original vase image of "Bond Girl", "Entertainment Weekly" wrote in a review of "Top Ten Bond Girls": "Michelle Yeoh is not the first Bond girl to be equal to Bond, but she is the only woman who makes people stand out, and she has established her position in Hollywood with her beautiful skills." ”

Michelle Yeoh also starred in many films based on the international market after "Tomorrow's Empire", and in Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", Michelle Yeoh's Chinese kung fu opened Hollywood again. There was a battle scene with Zhang Ziyi, and when she arrived on the set, she thought Ang Lee was joking, but Ang Lee told her very firmly: "I want you to use all the weapons on display here." ”

The popularity of the role template of "Kung Fu Girl" has a corrective effect on the tragic route of Huang Liushuang, Chen Chong, Gong Li and others, and the image of a weak woman who is humble and pitiful, waiting for the salvation of white "knights" has begun to become rare, and Chinese actresses can also be heroic in Hollywood movies. In this sense, Michelle Yeoh laid the foundation for the development of Zhang Ziyi, Liu Yuling and others in Hollywood.

After playing the role of Yujiaolong in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", Zhang Ziyi became internationally famous. Compared with the implicit and introverted character in Michelle Yeoh's film, Yu Jiaolong, who dares to love and hate, is actually more acceptable to Western audiences, Dai Jinhua believes: "Zhang Ziyi is accepted by the West, which is closely related to her image of Yu Jiaolong." Zhang Ziyi himself once said frankly: "The most effective and fastest way is kung fu films, and kung fu films can best open up the Hollywood market." ”

In "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", Zhang Ziyi plays Yu Jiaolong

Later, in Jackie Chan's "Rush Hour 2", Zhang Ziyi strengthened her impression of Western audiences, her characters are beautiful and powerful, and she has a bit of cunning and murderous terrible colors, which is very in line with the "both yearning and fearing" Oriental imagination, and also integrates several popular passwords in the past. In 2005, Time magazine wrote an article about Zhang Ziyi with the title "China's Gift to Hollywood", and the following year made Zhang Ziyi the cover character.

As a descendant of immigrants, Liu Yuling started as low as Zhang Ziyi, and did not get rid of the dragon trap until she was 29 years old, and played a supporting role in the American drama "Sweet Girl", so much so that she said to herself: "I never feel like I can stand in front, I always stand in the background." Later, he slowly rose to the front line as an action star: first showing hot fights in the action film "Thunderbolt Girl", and then starring as a ruthless female killer in Quentin Tarendylan's "Kill Bill", leaving an evil scene that many fans remember.

During this period, the international breakthrough and landing in Hollywood represented the positive pursuit of actors for higher halls and greater achievements, while Hollywood's attitude towards Chinese actresses was more divided. The "yellow peril theory" has naturally become ancient, but the stereotype still exists, and even "fighting" has become a new stereotype like the "detachment" of the past.

Whether it is "fighting" or "off", the cultural label that ultimately points to is still "exotic", Chinese actresses are mainly used to show the tools of the oriental background. For example, "Memoirs of a Geisha" gathers three Chinese actresses, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi, but tells a Japanese story, which is enough to show that their symbolic attributes are actually greater than their personal images.

It's easier, and it's "weaker"

The rise of China's film market has fundamentally changed the Hollywood journey of Chinese actresses.

In 2002, the total box office of the mainland was less than 1 billion yuan, and by 2012 it reached 17.073 billion, becoming the world's second largest film market in 10 years, and this rapid development momentum did not end there, and by 2019 Chinese mainland the box office exceeded 60 billion, and the gap with the North American film market narrowed to only about 2 billion US dollars.

In this process, Chinese actresses do not need to break into Hollywood with difficulty, on the contrary, Hollywood often caters to the needs of its second largest box office, and the presentation of the faces of Chinese actresses has changed from cultural curiosity to economic considerations. "Special films" and co-productions are also common.

The 2008 co-production "King of Kung Fu" was Liu Yifei's first starring role in an "international blockbuster", and unlike people's expectations at that time, Liu Yifei did not open an international route like his predecessors. Until 2020, she starred as the "Disney Princess" and brought "Mulan", which may be the most glorious and positive image of Chinese actresses in Hollywood live-action movies in a hundred years, embarrassing that Chinese audiences do not buy it, the film's Douban score is only 4.9, and the mainland box office is only 278 million yuan, ranking 20th in the same year.

Liu Yifei played Mulan in "Mulan"

Liu Yifei still has "big heroine" style works, and more often, Chinese actresses can only "brush their faces" in Hollywood movies. Before the release of "Transformers 4", "Li Bingbing worked hard to learn English" was a major publicity point, but in fact it only changed to less than 5 minutes of scenes. Zhang Jingchu was promoted as Tom Cruise's archrival when he joined "Mission Impossible 5", and after the film was released, it was only a dragon set role with no more than 5 lenses.

There are many such examples: Xu Qing in "Ring Messenger", Li Xiaolu in "Abnormal Energy", Chen Shu in "The Martian"... Another situation is that although the scenes are not few, they are not integrated into the film and look out of place. For example, in "King Kong: Skull Island", Jing Tian's face is always spotless in the harsh environment of the wild adventure, or Yang Ying's performance in "Independence Day 2" is called "as if watching "Run Brother" by many audiences...

With the help of the domestic market and investment in film companies, landing in Hollywood is far easier than in the past, but the presence of Chinese actresses in movies is actually weaker. After all, the logic of entering Hollywood has changed, and perhaps for a new generation of actresses, taking over Hollywood movies itself no longer represents career ambitions, but a "gold-plated" tool to raise their value.

Actresses who have never really left Hollywood, there have been good news in recent years. Liu Yuling reinterpreted the Watson beside Sherlock Holmes in the American drama "Basic Deduction", breaking through the racial and gender restrictions of this classic Western character. In 2019, after nearly 30 years of hard work in the North American film and television industry, she became the second Chinese actress named Avenue of Stars after Huang Liushuang.

"Instantaneous Universe" is Michelle Yeoh's first starring role in Hollywood in 25 years. She once cried to the camera and said that "this is the script I have been waiting for for a long time", and it is Michelle Yeoh's professional habit to avoid substituting her real self into the movies she starred in, but "this time I can empathize with the characters", "It gives me the opportunity to show my ability to the audience and my family." Funny, real, sad, finally someone believes I can do all of these things. "The large number of accolades won by "Instantaneous Universe" also repays Michelle Yeoh's efforts.

On a larger level, the entry of Chinese actresses into Hollywood has become unnecessary. However, those results still deserve congratulations. After all, the search for the identity of an exotic aesthetic is difficult in any era.