When it comes to the most typical image of our army's senior chief on the Chinese screen, it should be Li Yan, an old actor of the Bayi Factory, who in the entertainment industry for more than 50 years, has been praised for shaping director Huang in "Overture to the East" and Li Junchang in "Fighting the Invaders", as well as other military chiefs who are out of his mind, and has won many awards for meritorious service.
Li Yan has been engaged in literary and artistic performances for a long time, but he is not a film actor, and he has certain accidental factors when he stepped into film performances, that is, for family and love.
Li Yan was born in 1927 to a poor family in Li County, Baoding, Hebei Province. Since childhood, he has loved acting and singing. In 1943, the 16-year-old Li Yan often helped comrades in the underground party to do some secret work, leaving his hometown because his identity was exposed, defecting to the Eighth Route Army and applying for the Jizhong Fireline Drama Society. President Cui Wei took a look at this young man, and Li Yan stood out from more than 100 applicants and stepped into the palace of art. In 1950, he fell in love with and married Bai Feng, a singer of the troupe. Due to the reorganization of the troops, Li Yan entered the Anti-Enemy Drama Troupe of the Shenyang Military Region and stayed in Shenyang. Bai Feng was assigned to the opera troupe and followed the team into Beijing. Since then, Bai Feng has lived in Beijing with her two children, while Li Yan has lived in Shenyang, living a life of separation. Although this did not affect their feelings for each other in the slightest, after all, it brought a lot of difficulties and inconveniences to family life. At that time, there was no such thing as a north drift, there was no normal job transfer, and it was not easy to enter Beijing. So Li Yan thought of a way to transfer to Beijing to work.
In 1958, the Bayi Factory was optimistic about some good actors of the Anti-Enemy Drama Troupe and wanted to recruit actors from the Repertory Theatre. Li Yan especially wanted to use this opportunity to enter Beijing and reunite with his wife and two children as soon as possible. And he also loves movies and wants to be a professional film actor. He signed up aggressively.
However, at that time, the stars in the troupe were brilliant, and Li Yan's fame was not prominent enough. In the preliminary list of bayi factory, there is no him. This made him not depressed. And then good luck descends from the sky. An actor selected by the Bayi Factory, because his home is in Shenyang, is not willing to transfer his job, which provides Li Yan with a glimmer of hope. With the joint efforts and struggles of the two people, after consultation and hard work between the leaders, Bayi Factory agreed to the exchange of the two people, which achieved Li Yan's wish. In the summer of 1956, Li Yan, together with Tian Hua, Wang Xingang, Zhang Liang, Wang Runshen, and others from the same troupe, was transferred to the Bayi Film Studio and became a professional film actor.
After entering the Bayi Factory, Li Yan's first film was "The Legend of the Golden Bell", playing a PLA officer. After that, he starred in the movie "Jiangshan Duojiao" with Tian Hua and Ling Yuan, playing the secretary. He showed his talent and also attracted the attention of leaders and directors. In 1961, the Bayi Factory transplanted the play "Eastward Overture" won by the Nanjing Military Region Frontline Repertory Theatre in the All-Army Drama Performance into a movie, and all the actors selected the original team of the Frontline Repertory Theatre, and the unique number one, Huang Bingguang, chose Li Yan, which was a great success. Huang Bingguang, portrayed by Li Yan on the screen, is shrewd and sharp, upright and awe-inspiring, especially in the moments of stubborn tongue fighting, dashing and self-assured, relaxed and natural, and his witty and brave tall image makes the audience feel that Li Yan is acting, but feels that this is the "chief" of the living troops on the battlefield.
If Huang Bingguang is a classic of our army's chiefs engaged in political work in the "literary struggle," Li Guodong, the commander of the volunteer army, portrayed by Li Yan in "Fighting the Invaders" in 1964, is the pinnacle image of our army's senior military commanders. In order to truly portray the role of Li Guodong, the commander of the Volunteer Army, Li Yan, who had been to the Korean front to comfort the volunteer army, went deep into the troops and lived with Li Shuiqing, the commander of the 67th Army, for more than a month, from the heart to the body, from the personality to the temperament, completely reached a degree of falsehood, after the movie screening, everyone called him "Our Captain Li!" Since then, he has become the number one actor in the Chinese film industry who specializes in playing senior chiefs.
In the summer of 1997, when Li Yan participated in the filming of the TV series "Rose Is Still Red" starring Li Youbin, Li Ting and Jin Lili, he felt liver pain, but he insisted on finishing the scene, and when he came back to check, he found that he had biliary cancer.
The disease developed rapidly, and in the same year, the famous film performance artist Li Yan died of ineffective medical treatment at the age of 70.