Source: NYT (11/30/15)
The Last Reservoir of Glamour From China’s ‘Four Great Actresses’
By JANE PERLEZ
Qin Yi, 93, at her apartment in Shanghai, a city where she was cast in dozens of movies.CreditEric LeLeu for The New York Times
Ms. Qin browsed old photos at her apartment in Shanghai in November.CreditEric LeLeu for The New York Times
The heady days of 1930s Shanghai movies were slowing down when Ms. Qin, still a teenager, escaped the city and settled in Chongqing, the wartime capital to the west.
She slept in a tiny dormitory on a bamboo mattress on the floor with nine other girls, surviving on rice and soup. There, she met Zhang Ruifang, like her a fledgling actress, who had fled her bourgeois family in Beijing.
Two other up-and-coming stars, Bai Yang and Shu Xiuwen, were also in Chongqing, leading a Communist playwright and polemicist, Xia Yan, who had taken up residence there, to call the group “the four great actresses.” In 1946, after the defeat of the Japanese, the four returned to Shanghai, a cosmopolitan city of grand buildings and sleek bars, great wealth and terrible poverty. Three years later, the city fell to the Communists.
Ms. Qin starred in movies that helped make propaganda about the Communist Party’s new revolutionary society palatable. “The content was always designed to spread forward thinking,” she said
When Ms. Zhang had gotten to the city, she had styled herself after Ingrid Bergman, her favorite actress. Her second husband, Jin Shan, had served as a secret agent for the Communists in Chongqing.
A photograph of the couple in 1943 shows Ms. Zhang in a well-cut black jacket with a heart-shaped silver pin on one lapel. Mr. Jin wears a tweed sport jacket, a shirt and tie, and a handkerchief in his pocket.
Beneath her persona of old Shanghai elegance, however, Ms. Zhang was also an undercover Communist spy, said her grandson, Zhu Feng, a movie director, in an interview here. The two found out about each other’s clandestine work when party members informed them after Mr. Jin’s marriage proposal, Mr. Zhu said.
In Chongqing, Ms. Zhang’s controller had been Zhou Enlai, who ran the Communist intelligence operation in the city and went on to become prime minister and his grandmother’s lifelong friend, Mr. Zhu said. (Mr. Zhou, considered the intellectual of the Communist Party leaders, later called Ms. Qin the beauty of China.)
It was Mr. Jin, a bon vivant and denizen of bars, though, who was an especially skilled spy, maintaining good relations with the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai, Mr. Zhu said. Through Mr. Jin’s connections, a gang lord allied with the Nationalists married the couple in Shanghai.
In postwar Communist Shanghai, Ms. Qin and Ms. Zhang began making movies again. “Railway Guerrillas” called for the cast to go on location to Wuxi, a city west of Shanghai.
“It was summer and extremely hot, but we had to wear quilted jackets, as the scenes were supposed to be in winter,” Ms. Qin said. “The actors had to learn how to climb on and jump off a moving train. I learned to play the widow of a railway official killed by the Japanese. Then she cooked and spied for the guerrillas. It was 35 degrees Celsius,” about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, “and I had heat rash all over my neck.”
In 1963, Ms. Zhang won a national best actress award, and a grainy black-and-white image of her in Mr. Zhu’s collection of photographs shows Mr. Zhou grinning broadly as his protégée accepts the prize.
But again, not all was as it seemed. By then, Ms. Zhang’s marriage had broken up after Mr. Zhou’s goddaughter, Sun Weishi, a theater director, had an affair with Mr. Jin, Mr. Zhu said. She later married him.
Then, during the Cultural Revolution, the lives of the four actresses fell apart.
Artistic figures who had been favored by Mao and Mr. Zhou were singled out for vilification. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had been an opera star in Shanghai, appears to have taken special pleasure in excoriating the women she had known in the 1930s.
Ms. Zhang, perhaps because of her Communist pedigree from World War II, suffered the least. Although imprisoned, she was released after a year or two, Mr. Zhu said. For Ms. Qin, there were six years of hard labor away from Shanghai.
Red Guards denounced Shu Xiuwen, who died of heart failure during the period. Bai Yang, who was deemed by the Red Guards to be even more bourgeois than her colleagues, was kept in solitary confinement in a dark cell for five years. (She died in 1996.)
Ms. Zhang and Ms. Qin resumed acting after the Cultural Revolution, but it was never quite the same. Even now, though, awards for lifetime achievement keep arriving for Ms. Qin, who flew to Los Angeles several months ago to be honored by a Chinese American association.
Five years before Ms. Zhang died in 2012, Xi Jinping, now the president of China, visited her when he was mayor of Shanghai, in a sign of the deep respect the party held for her.
“Their careers flourished and then withered during the tumultuous Mao era,” Ying Zhu, a professor who studies cinema at the College of Staten Island, said of the four actresses. They believed in the Communist Party and immersed themselves in all their roles, she said, noting, “Given the little choice we had, many were indeed memorable roles that I grew up repeatedly watching.”
For the government, the actresses were vital, said Hao Jian, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. “Movies have been a very significant part of the red propaganda machine. The Chinese filmmakers like to quote Lenin as saying, ‘You must remember always that of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.’”
Yufan Huang contributed research.