Born in Los Angeles in 1905, in movies since she was a teenager, Anna May Wong was the first Chinese-American actress to make a name for herself in Hollywood. With her shiny black bob and imperious hauteur, which had a suggestion of something trembling, vulnerable and lonely beneath it, Wong established herself as an icon of '30s style, effortlessly holding her own alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Shanghai Express. At the same time, she was habitually paid far less than her caucasian co-stars and stereotyped in ways that she herself found increasingly insulting. At one point, she made her complaints heard on a film set with a film-magazine writer present: "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain. Murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilisation that is so many times older than that of the west?" When MGM filmed Pearl S. Buck's China-set potboiler The Good Earth in 1937, Wong lobbied for the role of the female lead, was turned down in favor of Luise Rainer, and then angrily turned down the part she was offered, that of a troublemaking seductress named Lotus. If she had taken the role, she would have been playing the movie's villain, surrounded by white actors playing the sympathetic Chinese characters in heavy make-up.
Wong was fifty-six years old when she died of a heart attack in 1961. (She was also suffering from cirrhosis of the liver.) By then, both her life and career had been blighted by the paradox of a career built on catering to racist fantasies about the slinky, cunning daughters of Fu Manchu. But, as has turned out to be the case with many black actors from Hollywood's past, Wong's talent and style have ended up casting a longer shadow than the insults she was handed to perform. In recent years, her reputation has enjoyed a bit of resurgence thanks to a couple of biographies, the rediscovery of the 1929 picture Piccadilly, and now a new, British film documentary, whose title, Frosted Yellow Willows, is a literal translation of Wong's Cantonese name. The documentary may not be perfect, but it does feature the best argument for Wong as a film artist of enduring value and the best tool for creating new Anna May Wong fans--namely, film clips of Anna May Wong. Writing in the Guardian, Matthew Sweet nails it: "We disapprove of the stereotypes she fleshed out — the treacherous, tragic daughters of the dragon — but her performances still seduce, for the same reason they did in the 1920s and '30s. . . You'll see how much the camera loved her, and how impossible it is not to feel the same."