The Importance of Being Nancy.
40 years after Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan finally became Hollywood’s first ever Asian leading lady.
Discussing the Asian experience during Hollywood’s golden age is, to put it mildly, difficult. From the magnetic Anna May Wong in the 1920s, we had to wait a full 40 years until the next time an Asian actress would become a bona-fide movie star — Nancy Kwan in the early 1960s. Here at Warner Archive, we’re happy to have one of Kwan’s films, made at the height of her heyday, here in the archive: 1963’s The Wild Affair.
Unlike Anna May Wong who, with few exceptions, would always play a supporting role, Kwan would become the first Asian actress to be a successful leading lady in mainstream Hollywood.
There were others, of course, but this is where things get even messier. British movie star Merle Oberon was half Indian, but hid her Asian ethnicity her whole life — a calculated move that allowed her to enjoy a prestigious career in top Hollywood movies. Sessue Hayakawa was a major motion picture personality during the silent era, the first ever Asian sex symbol, but his heavy Japanese accent did not lend itself to talkies, and at the outbreak of WWII he became a victim of America’s anti-Japanese temperament. Philip Ahn (of Kung-Fu fame) was a Korean American and Los Angeles native whose biggest crime was speaking English “too well.”
And of course there’s the embarrassing practice of giving Asian roles to Caucasians (today we call it whitewashing) — painting them in yellow face, often to rave reviews. Hollywood legends like Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, and Sir Alec Guinness all did it, German actress Luise Rainer won an Oscar for it (The Good Earth — a role that Anna May Wong had yearned to play), and Swedish actor Warner Oland is known even today for the highly popular “Charlie Chan” detective serials.
It is from this swampy, highly complex history that the beautiful and talented Nancy Kwan arises. She was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Kowloon Tong — her mother, a fashion model, was British, and her father, an affluent architect, was Chinese. From an early age, Kwan expressed a love of the arts. Kwan, who was schooled at a convent until 13, held ambitions to be a dancer and went on to study at the prestigious Royal Ballet in London. She was just 17 years old when she auditioned for the screen adaptation of The World of Suzie Wong: the successful Broadway play about a Hong Kong prostitute and her American lover.
Kwan had zero acting experience, and it showed in her initial screen test. But after hard work with a coach, a second screen test showed enough improvement to give producers hope and she landed a contract with Seven Arts.
Initially, however, she was not given the lead. That went to Marlon Brando’s then-girlfriend France Nguyen, who’d made a mark in the musical South Pacific. But Nguyen and Brando were having problems and she began to put on weight from stress. The producers dropped her to keep the film on track, and swapped in the inexperienced Kwan. For it, Kwan experienced the problem that faced (and still faces) actors of color. For Hollywood tastes, the mixed race Kwan looked too “Eurasian” for the role of the Chinese prostitute, heavy eye makeup was applied to give her what was then described as a more “occidental flavor.”
Fame came swiftly and without warning for the 18-year-old: overnight she became the first major Asian sex symbol since Anna May Wong — “The Chinese Bardot”, they called her. And, more to the point, the first Asian movie star who was allowed to be seen as fully “American.”
With Kwan, for the first time in the history of film, an Asian actually portrayed an Asian in a leading role — not a caucasian in yellow face. And not just any leading role, but one of a fiercely independent, modern-thinking woman. With that, countless stereotypes were challenged and shattered.
Despite the films’ box office success, it opened to mixed reviews and considerable opposition from within the Asian community — and it remains a controversial topic even today.
Her next role, in Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Flower Drum Song, seemed to cement the idea that Kwan was playing to outdated, offensive stereotypes of Asian women.
This deeply hurt Kwan.
“I guess they blamed me for that image, yes, of being a prostitute. The first time I heard it I thought, well, if she had been a nun it would have been a whole different thing, but because she was a prostitute they thought that every Asian woman was a Suzie Wong. — Nancy Kwan
This history is necessary to put in context the British satirical comedy The Wild Affair, streaming here at Warner Archive. In it, Kwan plays a young, perky office assistant named Majorie. She’s engaged to be married to a perfectly decent fellow, but becomes plagued by doubts if her fiance is the right one. There’s another side to Marjorie — a “wild” one that’s been kept button-up’d inside of her her whole life. One day, Marjorie gives in to that other self and that’s when the shenanigans begin.
The film, a light-hearted comedy that pokes fun at British middle class morality, offers an intimate view of life in London right at the birth of its cultural renaissance. While such classics as A Hard Day’s Night (1964) have come to define the swinging sixties, The Wild Affair came first (filmed in 1963) and it captures a culture in flux. It give us our first glimpses of what would soon be dubbed “Swinging London”: it’s attitudes, it’s growing disillusionment with the establishment, and…it’s fashion.
Queue Vidal Sassoon.
The Seven Arts film people telephoned to say, “We’d like you to cut Nancy’s hair for her role in The Wild Affair. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s get together this week and talk about it.” “No time for chat,” they said. “We want to come around right away.” — Vidal Sassoon
The young up-and-coming hairstylist took Kwan’s long, lustrous, jet black hair — already her trademark — and chopped it into a sleek, trendy bob. Just as had been the case in the ’20s, it was a battle cry of female empowerment.
Nancy Kwan’s dramatic new ‘do’ made waves worldwide, making the British and American editions of Vogue and came to be called the Nancy Kwan cut and helped propel Sassoon’s career into the stratosphere.
But perhaps the biggest reason to watch the film is to watch Kwan portray a regular working girl in a story that has nothing to do with race. She is the daughter of two very British parents (her mother is silent screen veteran Billie Dove), she’s engaged to a very British boy, and you never once bat an eye.
Producer Edward S. Feldman told Ray Stark — the man who discovered Kwan — “You can’t get away with this. She’s Chinese.”
Stark responded, “That’s your trouble. You continue to believe she’s Chinese.”
Obviously the viewer knows that this is Nancy Kwan, and she’s very obviously Asian, but Kwan is playing a character — and it is that character, not Kwan’s race, that swoops us up and carries us through the story.
She is quite simply, charming.
The film also serves as a sad reminder that even 50 years later, leading roles remain shockingly limited for Asian actors in Hollywood.
Watch the lovely Nancy Kwan in The Wild Affair, waiting for your in glorious HD on the all new Warner Archive, available on desktop as well as Roku, Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Join now and receive a *free* Roku streaming stick with your annual subscription.
Sources cited in this article:
Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London
Tell Me How You Love the Picture: A Hollywood Life
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
