On November 6, 1948, the Battle of Huaihai began. The East China Field Army, under the command of acting commander Su Yu, promptly cut off the retreat route of Huang Baitao's corps, which was shrinking toward Xuzhou, and surrounded it in the Nianzhuang area of Shandong. At the same time, the Central Plains Field Army captured Suxian County, a major military stronghold, cutting off the land retreat route of the Liu Zhi clique in Xuzhou. Chiang Kai-shek dispatched Du Yuming back to Xuzhou to fight, and several enemy corps gathered to approach Xuzhou, and the situation in the Huaihai Campaign was extremely grim. After more than ten days of fierce fighting, Huang Baitao's corps was annihilated, Du Yuming's group was besieged, and Huang Wei's corps was completely annihilated. Although Chiang Kai-shek tried in many ways to rescue Du Yuming's clique, in the end, because the army had no fighting spirit, the whole army was finally destroyed, and the decisive Huaihai Campaign was a complete victory.
In the early 1990s, in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of China, the Bayi Film Studio put the three major battles of the Liberation War on the big screen according to the instructions of the central government, of which the movie "Armageddon and the Battle of Huaihai" was passed down to this day. The actor named Xie Weicai, who played the acting commander of the East China Field Army in the movie, is called Xie Weicai, and his life is inseparable from the Battle of Huaihai.
When the Battle of Huaihai broke out, 7-year-old Xie Weicai was separated from his family, and a year later he joined the 12th Army Cultural and Labor Troupe of the Second Field Army of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (the East China Field Army was its predecessor), and saw General Su Yu in one performance, and has since formed a lifelong fate with this famous general who is brave and good at war. It is precisely because of Su Yu who starred in "Armageddon" that he found his relatives who had been separated from him for nearly forty years.
What is even more amazing is that his father, as a Kuomintang major, his troops were once defeated by Su Yu's troops on the battlefield of Huaihai.
Xie Weicai was born in 1941 in a family of Kuomintang officers, his father Xie Degui was a major officer in the Kuomintang troops, in the Huaihai battlefield was beaten by the PLA officers, defeated, in the fleeing Kuomintang army, there was Xie Weicai's father, at this time Xie Degui was taking his wife and his four children, running around, in the process of fleeing, accidentally lost the seven-year-old Xie Weicai.
Only at the age of seven, Xie Weicai, along with many family members of the Kuomintang army, became a "prisoner" of the People's Liberation Army. As a young man, he had no idea that it was Su Yu who was commanding this war, and he would not know what kind of fate he would form with him in the future.
Arriving at the People's Liberation Army's shelter, PLA soldiers asked him if he still had relatives, and Xie Weicai timidly said that his grandmother was in Jurong County near Nanjing, and he wanted to go to Jurong to find his grandmother.
So the cadres of the shelter entrusted him to a Kuomintang soldier who had been sent home and gave them road fares and road routes, and the Kuomintang soldier promised the PLA cadres to send Xie Weicai to his grandmother's house. However, the Kuomintang soldiers who saw the money in their eyes left Xie Weicai alone as soon as they arrived in Nanjing, carrying the travel expenses alone.
Xie Weicai really had no choice but to join the displaced people all the way to Jurong.
Although Jurong is a small place, Xie Weicai, who is only seven years old, cannot remember the address of his grandmother's house, so he had no choice but to return to the streets of Nanjing again and become a small beggar, looking for his parents while begging for food.
In April 1949, a million male divisions crossed the Yangtze River Graben, and Nanjing was liberated!
In the artillery of the liberation of Nanjing, Xie Weicai was again taken in a car and accompanied by the Kuomintang training team all the way to Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, after a fierce battle, the Kuomintang troops were completely destroyed, and the eight-year-old Xie Weicai was "captured" by the People's Liberation Army for the second time.
This time, however, Xie Weicai did not go anywhere, and he decided to stay in the Communist forces.
On May 6, 1949, xie Wei, who was only eight years old, joined the Cultural and Industrial Corps of the Twelfth Army of the Second Field Army of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and an orphan who had not attended a day's school became a literary and artistic soldier.
Liberation of Nanjing
Xie Weicai's first appearance on stage was to play a poor child in a small opera, the whole opera has only one line, that is, repeatedly crying and shouting "Mother", a seemingly simple line, but Xie Weicai performed several times but did not pass. He just held back his strength and howled, and he couldn't cry in tears anyway, and then the squad leader of the performance team gave him a high move.
"Little devil, think of your mother-in-law."
The more motherless the child, the more he can appreciate the preciousness of maternal love.
This sentence undoubtedly touched Xie Weicai's heart, and he cried uncontrollably at once, until the end of the performance, he was still crying, everyone in the performance team could not stop, and the head of the unit in the unknown was still praising Xie Weicai: "This little actor is really devoted, his feelings are sincere, and he is moving." ”
In fact, the chief didn't know that Xie Wei was an orphan, so he would behave so devotedly.
Later, Xie Weicai recalled this incident and said with a smile: "This is the artistic enlightenment I first got, that is, at this time, every role I play, every performance, I am pursuing more seriously, more real, more moving." ”
At that time, Xie Weicai was in the army, not only to participate in the performance, but also to follow the transfer of the troops, while learning cultural knowledge, intelligent and studious, he actually turned over a dictionary. After self-study, he could read a tome like "How Steel is Made" in its entirety without the guidance of others, and he learned to write poetry at the age of 14.
Because the troops needed to be transferred frequently, and Xie Weicai was still young, the head of the unit felt that he was too hard to march and fight, so he was transferred to the Peking Opera team of the Twelfth Army, although he was in a second-line unit, he still had to practice, shoot, and perform every day.
Once, when he played Zhuge Liang's piano boy in the Peking Opera "Empty City Plan", he did not expect that he actually stood on the "city tower" due to lack of sleep and fell asleep, and when Zhuge Liang was standing at the head of the city looking at the mountain, Xie Weicai on the other side of the city was still sleeping beautifully.
Suddenly there was a long series of laughter in the audience, and he woke up after hearing the laughter, and it turned out that he had fallen from the "city head" because he had slept too much, and smashed the "city wall" into a large piece. The actor who played Zhuge Liang flicked his sleeve away, and because he snoozed, he triggered a performance accident.
Stills from the Peking opera "Empty City Plan"
After the outbreak of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, twelve-year-old Xie Weicai followed the Peking Opera Troupe of the Volunteer Army to the front line of the Korean battlefield to comfort the commanders and fighters of the Volunteer Army.
During his time in North Korea, Xie Weicai's deepest impression was a special performance.
When Zhou Enlai visited North Korea, the Volunteer Army Peking Opera Troupe staged a traditional play for the Volunteer Army, "The Case of The Beauty of The United States", in which the protagonist Bao Zheng was played by Fang Rongxiang, the face of Qiu Pai, and Xie Weicai played the son of another protagonist, Qin Xianglian.
In the crowd watching the performance, there was a tall but very energetic senior volunteer general who looked very special in the audience, and the people in the background and Xie Weicai said that the person you are talking about is Su Yu.
General Su Yu
After the end of the Korean War, Xie Weicai was transferred from the army to the Shandong Peking Opera Troupe, and then seconded to the Shandong Provincial Repertory Theatre, but in that era of class struggle, Xie Weicai's origin made the organization difficult:
He is the descendant of a Kuomintang officer, a man of bad birth, but he joined the revolutionary work at the age of eight, "young old revolutionary".
Unclear, let Xie Weicai in the drama troupe slightly embarrassed.
In addition, he has a relatively withdrawn personality and will not handle interpersonal relations, so he has not joined the party, the organization does not dare to approve, although he is conscientious in his work, he has always been a small dragon set actor, sometimes he has the task of performing on stage, and he also plays the kind of dispensable role of "Bandit A" and "Bandit B", with only one or two lines, or sometimes not even a line.
Once, he had a hard time playing the role of Kim Dae-yong, a scout of a certain unit of the Korean People's Army in the model play "Surprise Attack on the White Tiger Regiment", but there was no name on the cast list of the performance poster, and if he did not tell it himself, he did not know what role he played in the play.
Stills of the modern revolutionary Peking Opera "Surprise Attack on the White Tiger Regiment"
It wasn't until one day in June 1989 that Xie Wei, after forty years of mediocre stage career, finally ushered in a turning point in his life. The Bayi Film Studio sent a telegram to the Shandong Provincial Repertory Theatre, inviting Xie Weicai to Beijing for an audition.
The leader of the Shandong Provincial Repertory Theatre told xie Weicai, 48, the good news.
Xie Weicai was both excited and uneasy at this time, thinking that his ordinary decades of acting career had been doing nothing, and this time he finally ushered in the favor of bayi factory, could he seize this opportunity?
He packed his bags and stepped onto the northbound train.
On the first day that Xie Weicai came to the Bayi Factory to audition, the makeup artist quickly gave Xie Weicai makeup according to Su Yu's appearance, and also compared it to Su Yu's photo and said: "Old Xie, your conditions are very sufficient, and general Su Yu is still relatively similar" Xie Weicai put on his military uniform and walked to the video room.
Xie Weicai
There was a large mirror in the corridor leading to the video studio, Xie Weicai accidentally saw himself in the mirror when he passed the large mirror, his excited heart suddenly cooled half, although he looked very similar in the mirror, but his heart did not have the feeling of General Su Yu. I felt like a veteran in the mirror, and I didn't have the momentum of a generation of war gods commanded by Fang Shuo on the Battlefield of Huaihai.
Xie Weicai had been a small soldier for half a lifetime, how could he have the same temperament as Su Yu?
Xie Weicai sighed helplessly and entered the video room with a hard scalp. Despite the lack of momentum, with his forty years of stage experience, he still performed a play of Su Yu.
The director expressed satisfaction with his audition, but told him that "although you look like Su Yu and have certain acting skills, what you lack is temperament, you have to speculate more about the psychology of the characters, read more information, and enrich the characters." ”
The most important thing for an actor is temperament, without temperament, the role played has no soul, Xie Weicai in order to play a good Su Yu, read all the information about Su Yu, a "famous general Su Yu" let him watch no less than dozens of times, specially ran to the military museum, copied all the photos of Su Yu, carefully pondered Su Yu's psychological activities, looking for those unique temperaments of senior generals. Just to imitate Su Yu's walking, during the shooting of Xibaipo, there was a place that Xie Weicai stepped on and couldn't even grow grass.
He also specially found various military maps of the Huaihai Campaign and pasted them in his dormitory, reviewing the progress of the development of the campaign over and over again.
In his own exploration and experience, he gradually paid attention to the main characteristics of General Su Yu's immersion in good thinking, and felt that he was getting closer to the character of Su Yu step by step, and slowly grew from a small soldier to a general.
Although Su Yu's footage of Su Yu in the "Armageddon" movie is not very many, Xie Weicai successfully portrayed the image of a revolutionary Confucian general quite perfectly, and won the praise of the people of the whole country for a while. At the premiere of the film, then-President Yang Shangkun shook Xie Weicai's hand and said: "Weicai, you Su Yu acted well, acting like the real thing!" Ding Zhao, head of the "Central Leading Group for Major Revolutionary Historical Themes," also said: "General Su Yu is my old chief, and I know him best, and Xie Weicai interpreted the character quite perfectly and performed the style of General Su Yu. ”
Xie Weicai also ushered in a turning point in his acting career through his performance in "Armageddon", he not only won the "People's Liberation Army Artistic Contribution Award" but also played Su Yu in his Su Yu trilogy - "The Battle of Yudong", "Seven Wars and Seven Victories", "Hero Meng Lianggu", as well as "The Battle of Jinan", "Armageddon", "The Great March to Ninghuhang" and more than 100 dramas.
Because he often plays Su Yu, so that Su Yu's temperament has gradually penetrated into his bones, so that Xie Weicai has also become Su Yu in his life, reaching the realm of "no distinction between people and dramas".
Once, when Xie Weicai went to the home of Su Yu's wife, Chu Qing, her driver opened the door and blurted out: "The chief is home!" And Su Yu's grandchildren also recognized Su Yu played by Xie Weicai, at the dinner table, Su Yu's grandson and grandson, looking at Xie Weicai, said: "Uncle, you look familiar, you look like my grandfather." ”
Because of Su Yu, he was separated from his parents, and because of Su Yu, he found a family, Xie Weicai's life is a miracle.
Since his separation from his parents in 1949, Xie Wei often dreamed of his parents at night, and after his daughter was born, he specially named his daughter Xie Wei, hoping to reunite with his family as soon as possible.
Children miss their parents, don't parents think about their children?
Not quite either.
After liberation, Xie Weicai's father Xie Degui came to Shanghai, worked as a repairman in Shanghai Port, the mother earned money by bringing children to others, life was very weekdays, every New Year's Day, parents had to put an extra pair of dishes on the table, indicating that Xie Weicai had been alive, but he did not know where, until Xie Weicai's mother died, he also told his children over and over again, You must find the eldest brother and let us reunite the family. ”
One day in 1991, "Armageddon: The Huaihai War" premiered in Shanghai, and at this time, a hydrographic technician named Xie Weixing watched the movie and felt that the actor who played Su Yu seemed to be a big brother who had been lost for more than forty years.
Xie Weixing returned home, and his two younger brothers and four younger sisters said happily: "I have found Brother Ah, he is now an actor, and he also played Su Yu!" The six brothers and sisters went to the movie together this time, looking for their brother on the big screen.
At this time, Xie Weicai had already left Shanghai and returned to Beijing, because the younger siblings had seen that the Shanghai Xinmin Evening News had interviewed their brother, so they hoped that the comrades of the Xinmin Daily would contact their brother and reunite their family.
The two sides have communicated that it is indeed their brother, and everyone is overjoyed, and immediately agreed to meet in Jinan during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
On the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1991, Xie Weixing brought his six younger siblings to Xie Weicai's home in Jinan, and the thought of separating for forty years turned into two lines of tears, and the seven brothers and sisters hugged each other and shed tears happily.
Xie Weicai Great March • Great War Ninghu Hangzhou Stills
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="88" > Postscript</h1>
Gathering and dispersing all have a fate, and this fate comes from General Su Yu. If he hadn't been separated from his parents, Xie Weicai would not have become a member of the People's Liberation Army at all, nor would he have played general Su Yu.
Xie Weicai later recalled: "Sometimes I often wondered if it was really a mysterious force that controlled everything, and General Su Yu won the Xuzhou Victory at the Battle of Huaihai, leaving me and my parents separated. Decades later, I played General Su Yu on the big screen, showing the cool and heroic posture of General Su Yu on the big screen. ”
"What's even more amazing is that because I played Su Yu in the movie, not only did I receive honors that I couldn't reach before, but I also found my long-lost siblings. After reuniting with his family, he learned that his parents had died one after another. ”
"Several major events and tragedies and joys on my life path have made me closely linked to this god of war?"
Finally, Xie Weicai said a touching sentence to describe his connection with General Su Yu.
"I don't believe in fate, but I talk about fate, and I think that's fate."