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?"
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