lasca sartoris...
Archive/RSS/Ask
Lonely Londoner living the Lush Life
| introducing... | index... | reading list... | |
| pinterest... | twitter... | instagram... | Lasca's London list... |
“Anna May Wong, Chinese Film star, received a $20,000 threat letter. She sits, holding the letter which threatened her with disfigurement.” (March 25, 1937)
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library
Anna May Wong, 1938. Publicity still from the film Dangerous to Know
(Source: cosmosonic)
Maylia, AKA Mrs. Benson Fong
Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, Maylia — real name: Gloria Chin — was just a 20-year-old coed vacationing in Hollywood when she was spotted in a restaurant by the wife of writer-producer Sidney Buchman. She was asked to audition for a role in Buchman’s big-budget project, To the Ends of the Earth, and voilà! — a star was born. Of course, she would need to change her name to something more befitting the “first Chinese starlet since Anna May Wong”, something a little more exotic. According to the studio publicity, “Maylia is her name, and in Cantonese it means beautiful” (The Huntingdon Daily News, March 3, 1947).* Around the same time, Gloria underwent another name change. Within days of signing her contract with Columbia Pictures, she had a fateful meeting with actor Benson Fong (best known at the time as Charlie Chan’s “number three son”). It must have been love at first sight, because the two got hitched a few weeks later.
Maylia AKA Gloria Chin from Detroit, hailed by Columbia Pictures as Hollywood’s “first Chinese starlet since Anna May Wong”.
This is a publicity still from the 1948 film “To the Ends of the Earth”.
Find out more about Maylia at http://softfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/maylia-beautiful-in-cantonese.html
