Zhao Huishen: The reason she committed suicide is because she played a prostitute in "Road Angel"
Text/Lao Zhang is on the road
01
Poor Vega,
Transformed into a horse woman.
The black magpie did not come,
Winding milk road.
Lu Xun's satirical poem made Zhao Jingshen greatly "famous" and fell into the nickname of "fainting when encountering horses, loving cattle into sex". Zhao Jingshen was a famous literary historian, translator, writer and opera researcher, and had considerable contacts with Lu Xun at that time. In his translation, Zhao Jingshen mistranslated the half-man and half-horse as "half-man, half-cow" and the Milky Way as "Milk Road". Later, because of the controversy over the "hard translation" of translation, Lu Xun's satire of Zhao Jingshen was introduced.
(Zhao Jingshen)
In April 1902, Zhao Jingshen was born in Lishui, Zhejiang (now part of Lanxi City), his ancestral home was Yibin, Sichuan, and moved to Wuhu, Anhui At the age of 5, his great-grandfather Zhao Liangxi was a Qing Dynasty Hanlin, and his father Zhao Xijia edited and published publications in the early years of the Republic of China.
Zhao Jingshen's younger sister, Zhao Huishen, was born in 1914 and attended the Tianjin Women's Normal Affiliated Primary School and the Nanjing Church Middle School as a child. At the age of twelve or thirteen, he participated in drama activities and performed plays such as "Vixen" with his brother Zhao Jingshen. After that, he went to Shanghai and studied literature at Southern University.
In 1932, Zhao Huishen was appointed as a drama officer of the Shandong Provincial Experimental Theater, and participated in the performances of "Father's Return" and "Tragedy on the Lake". In the summer of 1934, Zhao Huishen joined the famous Chinese drama troupe "China TravelIng Theater Troupe".
02
Founded in Shanghai in November 1933, the China Traveling Theater Troupe ended in Nanjing in 1947. The China Traveling Theater Troupe is a folk professional theater troupe initiated and organized in China by Tang Huaiqiu in the form of a European traveling theater troupe, relying entirely on the performance income to support the activities and living expenses of the whole troupe.
From July 1934 onwards, the troupe traveled north to Beiping, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang and other places. In Beiping, he received help and guidance from dramatists Jiao Juyin, Ma Yanxiang, Xiong Foxi, Wang Wenxian, Li Jianwu, Cao Yu, etc., and improved the level of watch and director. At the same time, it absorbed a number of rookies such as Tao Jin, Zhao Huishen, Bai Yang, and Blue Horse.
In October 1935, the troupe premiered "Thunderstorm" at the Xinxin Cinema in the British Concession of Tianjin, which caused a sensation in Tianjin. Zhou Puyuan played by Dai Ya, Zhou Ping played by Tao Jin, Fan Yi played by Zhao Huishen, and Si Feng played by Zhang Manping left a deep impression on the audience.
"Thunderstorm" is a play written by the playwright Cao Yu, published in the Literary Quarterly in July 1934. In October 1935, the China Traveling Theater Troupe performed "Thunderstorm" in Tianjin, which was the first time that a professional repertory theater in China performed the play.
After the Spring Festival in 1935, the troupe began to rehearse "Thunderstorm", but The mayor of Beiping, Yuan Liang, banned the play from performing in Beiping on the charge of "debauchery". Just when CTS's "Thunderstorm" was stranded due to the failure of the censorship, Chinese students studying in Japan staged "Thunderstorm" for the first time in Tokyo. In August of the same year, a student drama troupe called Gusong Opera Troupe in Tianjin performed "Thunderstorm" at the Municipal Normal School, setting a precedent for performing "Thunderstorm" in China. When the Gusong Troupe performed, Cao Yu asked Tang Huaiqiu, the head of the China Traveling Theater Troupe, to come to Tianjin to watch. Seeing that Tianjin did not prohibit the performance of "Thunderstorm", Tang Huaiqiu decided to bring a troupe to Tianjin to perform.
Cao Yu, who was watching the scene at that time, especially praised the performances of Zhao Huishen and Tang Ruoqing. The prosperous yi played by Zhao Huishen vividly reveals the complex psychological activities of the prosperous with a deep and subtle performance full of inner passion. This performance has caused a sensation in the drama world and entered the history of modern Chinese drama performance.
(Left is Zhao Huishen, right is Zhou Xuan)
In 1937, Zhao Huishen played the prostitute XiaoYun in the film "Road Angel" written and directed by Yuan Muzhi, Zhou Xuan played another prostitute Xiaohong, and Zhao Dan played the male protagonist. Zhao Huishen has great sympathy for the role, and deeply melts this sympathy into the accurate and delicate understanding and experience of the character's desolate life, and successfully shapes the artistic image of the kind and unfortunate prostitute XiaoYun with her superb acting skills.
A drama, a movie, a boom, a small cloud, Zhao Huishen has since enjoyed the reputation of the art garden film industry.
03
After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1937, Zhao Huishen joined the fourth team of the Shanghai Rescue Drama Team and went to various places to carry out anti-Japanese propaganda and performance activities. Here, she and the famous film director Chen Liting performed a love story in the fire.
Chen Liting (October 20, 1910 – August 27, 2013), born in Shanghai, was formerly known as Chen Sibai and pen named Qilin as a director and screenwriter.
When Chen Liting was young, his adoptive mother sent him to a private school to study, and the old gentleman of the private school gave him the scientific name "Carp Court". After the death of his adoptive parents, he was cared for by his uncle Chen Gensheng and transferred him from private school to Feihong National Primary School. He graduated from the Higher Normal Department of Shanghai Daxia University in 1930.
(Chen Liting)
Chen Liting is the original creator of the classic live newspaper drama "Put Down Your Whip", directed many films such as "Distant Love", "Li Ren Xing", "Happy Rhapsody" and other films, and was the director of Shanghai Tianma Film Studio. Tian Han, Xia Yan, Guo Moruo, Chen Zichen and other playwrights are his film partners, and Zhao Dan, Jin Shan, Bai Yang, Qin Yi, Zhang Ruifang, Shangguan Yunzhu, Huang Zongying and other actors are also under his screen guide, and the drama road is getting wider and wider.
Zhao Hui loves drama deeply, but seems to prefer to do behind-the-scenes work. After joining the Shanghai Amateur Experimental Theater Troupe led by the Federation of Dramas in Shanghai, Zhao Huishen became the secretary of Chen Liting, a director of the troupe and deputy director of the choreography department, organizing the repertoire, compiling propaganda manuscripts, contacting progressive actors and writers, etc. Xia Yan's "Under the Eaves of Shanghai" and Cao Yu's "Wilderness" are all masterpieces that she personally organized and put on the stage for the first time.
(Stills of the prostitute Xiaoyun)
After the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Zhao Huishen was organized into the fourth team of anti-enemy dramas led by Chen Liting, and set out from Shanghai to the northwest, Chengdu, and Hankou to shout for the propaganda of the War of Resistance in the theater and rear. Zhao Huishen did not speak much, and sat on the side to write when acting breaks. At first, others didn't know what she was writing, and thought she was writing love letters or family letters, but later learned that she was writing articles for the newspaper. In fact, she can speak the Tao, but only keep silent to unfamiliar people. Moreover, she already had the spark of love in her heart at that time.
On the anti-Japanese beacon road, Chen Liting and Zhao Huishen lived together.
(Stills)
04
In the early summer of 1941, Chen Liting and Zhao Huishen went to Chongqing and lived in a small room upstairs of the "Wen Association" in the Zhangjia Garden, adjacent to Chen Baichen. At this time, the "China Drama Art Society" had just been established. She also became an officer, assisting Chen Liting and Xin Hanwen, the only Communist Party member in the drama club, to jointly take charge of Zhang Luo's acting work.
I don't know when it began, Zhao Huishen and Chen Liting had a disagreement, and she moved to a smaller room behind the tea house opposite the Cathay Theater to live alone. That room has no windows, no sunlight all day long, and it is also illuminated by light during the day. Everyone jokingly called her "night owl" because she didn't sleep almost all night, reading alone until late at night...
(Film poster directed by Chen Liting)
Zhao Huishen, Lu En, and Qin Yi were very talkative. Sometimes she would mention Chen Liting to her close friends, saying that he was a person, even if his wife gave birth in the back, he would not look back, but just immersed himself in his book.
Zhao Huishen's often leisure place is the tea house of about 40 square meters opposite the Cathay Theater, called a pot of tea, to be strong, and then smoke one after another. Her addiction to smoking was contracted during the filming of "Road Angel", because the character of the inferior prostitute Xiao Yun needed to smoke a lot. But in Chongqing, her addiction to smoking was already very large, and in the double smoke of smoke and tea, she probably forgot about her emotional troubles.
Zhao Huishen, who is enthusiastic and bold, has a strong side in his personality, and is accustomed to handling it in a simple way at work and emotionally. Chen Liting's "Qu Yuan" was transferred to Beibei for performance in the summer of 1942, and for some reason, Bai Yang could not take the stage after acting in the south; the China Opera Art Society performed "Spring and Autumn of the Kingdom of Heaven" in Chengdu in the winter of 1943, and the actress who played Fu Shanxiang's sister-in-law fell ill. In terms of drama, she is a generalist, adapting a play "Free Soul", directed by He Mengaxe, Wang Ping, Tao Jin, etc. in Chengdu; she has also written the Peking Opera "Three Dissatisfactions" and the film script "The Story of Not Afraid of Ghosts", which is affectionately known as "Baidai Company" by everyone, and anything can be "substituted". However, there is a rift in her feelings with Chen Liting, and she seems to have used the method of work, saying that she will break it...
(Chen Liting's later years)
05
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, in 1946, Zhao Huishen was demobilized to Shanghai, and then went to the Liberated Area of Northern Jiangsu with Song Zhi and others, and Chen Liting was preparing to make a movie at that time, but in fact, the two chose to break up completely.
This is somewhat similar to the plot of a certain movie directed by Chen Liting, in which the hero and heroine stay in the rear and the other on the front line, except that the realistic version is interpreted by themselves...
In 1948, Zhao Huishen went to Dalian, Liaoning, a liberated area, to serve as the principal of the Xiqu School and train a new generation. Chen Liting still couldn't give up this relationship in his heart, so he rushed to Dalian to see Zhao Huishen, brought a lot of good cigarettes, and asked to reconcile with her. However, perhaps Zhao Huishen's heart was already dead, and she did not agree to Chen Liting's suggestion, but left the cigarette that was given to her. Chen Liting left with regret, leaving a cigarette butt in her room.
(Chen Liting family)
After the founding of New China, Zhao Huishen was transferred from the northeast to Beijing to work as a responsible editor in the Beijing Film Studio...
Such a kind, warm, cheerful and indisputable woman cannot escape the doom. In 1966, a poster was posted on her door, saying she was a "ghost of the 30s." She was insulted for playing a prostitute in Road Angel.
On December 4, 1967, Zhao Hui, who was "not afraid of ghosts", committed suicide with deep hatred and died at the age of 53. As with the treatment of marriage in those years, she chose to not bend, but this time she gave her most precious life.
(The picture in this article is a network information)