Trivia of Anne May Wong

 Trivia of Anne May Wong (3 January 1905 - 3 February 1961)

*Wong Liu Tsong known professionally as Anna May Wong.Born in Los Angeles to first-generation Taishanese Chinese-American parents, Wong became infatuated with films and began acting in films at an early age though her father dislike it.

*Wong was working at Hollywood's Ville de Paris department store when Metro Pictures needed 300 female extras to appear in Alla Nazimova's film The Red Lantern (1919). A friend with movie connections helped her land an uncredited role as an extra carrying a lantern.

*When most people think of Technicolor movies, they likely think about The Wizard of Oz (1939), but the first Technicolor feature actually hit theaters 17 years earlier. It was called The Toll of the Sea (1922) and starred a 17-year-old Wong in her first lead role.This movie also the first color feature anywhere that did not require a special projector to be shown.

*Made her theatre debut on the London stage with Laurence Olivier in a play called "The Circle of Chalk (1929)". English critics and audiences complained that her American accent was too strong for her to be understood.

*It is believed by some that Wong never kissed her leading man on the lips on screen but she does share just such a kiss with John Loder in Java Head (1934). Such a scene was filmed for her film The Flame of Love (1930) with John Longden but was deleted by censors who felt that moviegoers might be offended by an interracial kiss. Also in Lady from Chungking (1942), Harold Huber, a Caucasian playing a Japanese general, kisses her on the lips as the scene fades, in the 63rd minute of the film.

*Throughout her life, Wong was vocal about the restrictions racism put on her career, calling out the industry for largely casting her in one of two stereotypical roles: the demure Asian woman or the villainous "Dragon Lady."“I was so tired of the parts I had to play,” she said in a 1933 interview. "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that."She once said: "When I die, my epitaph should be: I died a thousand deaths. That was the story of my film career. Most of the time I played in mystery and intrigue stories. They didn’t know what to do with me at the end, so they killed me off."

*Her final film was Portrait in Black (1960) starred Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn.She still found herself stereotyped, with one press release explaining her long absence from films with a supposed proverb, which was claimed to have been passed down to Wong by her father: "Don't be photographed too much or you'll lose your soul".

*On February 3, 1961, at the age of 56, Wong died of a heart attack as she slept at home in Santa Monica, two days after her final screen performance on television's The Barbara Stanwyck Show in an episode entitled "Dragon by the Tail".