Anna May Wong was Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star. Her first leading role, in “The Toll of the Sea,” went on to general release 97 years ago today, and Google honors her with a doodle.
She was born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905. Her parents taught her and her siblings to speak both English and Cantonese. Google said she would hang around movie studios as a child and ask directors for roles. By age 11, she had picked her stage name — Anna May Wong.
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Not getting the roles she wanted, Wong moved to Europe in 1928 and starred in plays and movies. Hollywood was soon asking her to come back.
“My favorite thing about Wong is her can-do approach to life,” said Sophie Diao, who created the doodle honoring Wong. “It shows in her dedication to her craft (hanging around film sets early on as a child, giving herself 10 years to succeed as an actor, and then moving her entire life to Europe when the U.S. wouldn’t let her play meaningful parts). She was a second-generation American, but others still saw her as an exotic foreigner. Despite this, she rolled with the punches, took on lots of roles that gave her practice and notoriety, and stood up for herself when she could (like when she turned down a secondary role in The Good Earth when she was passed over for the lead). I can empathize with feeling caught between your own identity and the identity others expect you to have.”
One of Wong’s first roles when she returned to the U.S. was opposite Marlene Dietrich in “Shanghai Express,” which became one of her most famous roles. In the 1950s, she became the first Asian American to have the leading role in a U.S. TV series, playing a detective in “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.”
Wong was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
The search engine's doodle tradition began in 1998 when, according to the company itself, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played around with the corporate logo "to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert."
Now there is an entire team of illustrators bringing biographies, history and interesting tidbits to life on Google’s homepage.
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