How Anna May Wong changed stardom in Britain

When Anna May Wong arrived in London in July 1928 to make her first British film, she was already a rising Hollywood actor, and had just made her first European film during a visit to Germany. By the end of her British stint in 1934, after shooting six films at studios such as Elstree, Ealing and Gainsborough, she had truly earned the mantle of cinema’s first Asian-American star.

While she was not the first East Asian actor to headline a British film, with silent movies such as Sen Yan’s Devotion (1924) having featured real-life couple Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, Wong was probably British cinema’s first lead actor of colour to sustain a career across multiple productions. She thus paved the way for figures like Paul Robeson and Sabu, major stars of early British talkies, as well as the long-forgotten Stella Moya and Lai Foun, who headlined more minor productions in the 1930s. The widening range of parts available to them would owe much to Wong’s iconic example.

Anna May Wong’s UK debut came in E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly, the melodramatic tale of a white London nightclub owner who falls helplessly for Wong’s Shosho, a kitchen worker he promotes to become his star dancer. Wong’s overnight success was vividly expressed by critics like Iris Barry, whose feature article ‘Anna May and Her Hands’ nevertheless devotes far fewer words to her Piccadilly performance than to her exoticism, likening her to a “priceless painted figure”, before recording Barry’s surprise at discovering that Wong and her sister spoke like “modern young American women, not two escaped princesses from an Eastern tale”.

On the other hand, the film’s original screen story (by renowned novelist Arnold Bennett) betrayed a remarkable sensitivity in capturing Shosho’s perspective, including in a defiant speech to those who would “look down on me because I’m Chinese […] and because I’ve lived here in Limehouse and don’t talk English like you do and don’t behave like you do”, squarely attributing her low status in England to “all that you Europeans did in China”. 

Less impressively, however, Bennett’s lack of familiarity with Chinese culture led him to call his heroine Shosho no Kimi, probably cribbing from a recent translation of The Tale of Genji. Not only was the writer content to give his Manchu character a Japanese name, he also lost its crucial first character, transforming the Heian-period lady-in-waiting Koshōshō no Kimi (小少将の君) into Shōshō (少将) – and thus investing his scullery maid with the impressive military rank of Major General. 

Wong’s first talkie appearance came in a barnstorming revue, Elstree Calling – and in the unlikely form of a burlesque of Hollywood’s recent adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. While the humour of its scripted version was derived from the supposed incongruity of a Chinese actor performing Shakespeare, the joke nevertheless relied on Wong performing it well (including in Cantonese translation) and in authentic period costuming. While the sketch was initially shot by director Adrian Brunel as written, this first version was eventually left on the cutting room floor, and Wong’s serious Shakespearian soliloquies were lost to history.

Instead, the final sketch was completely reshot by a young Alfred Hitchcock, who abandoned subtle pastiche in favour of outright farce: her co-star Donald Calthrop now spends its first minute whipping a motorcycle, and Anna May fares little better. Scantily clad in a Piccadilly stage outfit, she now merely shouts a few phrases in Taishanese before throwing an endless series of custard pies at everyone else on set. Still, in contrast to the vast majority of her films, at least she doesn’t die at the end.

Piccadilly’s overwhelming critical success was matched by its scandalous popular reception, most of which obsessed over the alleged sordidness of its interracial relationship. In the face of attacks from all sides, the British censors responded by announcing a ban on what they hamfistedly called “parti-coloured kissing”. While apparently never official censorship policy, it was nevertheless claimed as the reason for forbidding Anna May Wong from kissing any of the white actors in her next starring vehicle, The Flame of Love, in which she similarly played a Chinese entertainer in love with a Russian soldier. In the film’s ludicrous final form, its hero would be reduced to making out with her hands, while the nefarious villain must remain content with gnawing on her arm.

The censors’ reactionary decision would inspire several impassioned defences of Wong’s right to kiss her co-stars, the most remarkable of which took the form of a poem published by the China Weekly Review. Hong Kong contributor Yan-Phou Lee’s ‘Advice to Anna May Wong’ condemned “the censors, sick with Nordicitis”, before offering up a potential loophole in its closing lines:

If kissproof rouge your lips does cover -
Thickly of course, sweet Anna Wong;
And glue or gum those of your lover,
You’ll seem to kiss but won’t do wrong.

After spending 1931 and 1932 in America, Wong’s triumphant return to London’s studios would result in perhaps the most remarkable of her British films, Tiger Bay. Rather than the waifs she was often cast as in many of her early films, her character was one far closer to her own headstrong personality: the streetwise and ruthless restaurant owner Lui Chang, who resorts to any means necessary to defend those around her from the targeted attacks of a murderous gang. 

The film’s impact was all the more impressive for its having been another rushed affair, once again waylaid by the censors. Tiger Bay’s setting, which was intended to reproduce an American-style gangster film in London’s docklands, had led to the screenplay’s rejection as totally unsuitable for filming. 

But the censors had reckoned without writer Billie Bristow, formerly a legendary publicist and still one of British cinema’s smoothest talkers. In a little over a week, she coaxed them round from their categorical rejection to greenlighting the film’s immediate production, now safely rehomed in a fictitious South American port, and it was completed in time to capitalise on Wong’s 1933 to 1934 theatrical tour of the British Isles.

Chu-Chin-Chow promised Wong another opportunity to expand her range, in a lavish adaptation of Britain’s famed Arabian Nights musical, as reimagined by Walter Forde, the country’s most versatile director. With Wong playing the lead female role of enslaved Egyptian spy Zahrat, it was a rare example of a film in which her Asian identity was in no way an explicit part of the film’s story – although she was still left to perform all of Zahrat’s meaty villainy, effectively appearing as the film’s femme fatale.

With this reputation preceding her, the film’s pressbook included an anecdote allegedly told “with great glee” by Wong: “She was coming out of the Gaumont-British studios one day when a little girl came rather shyly up to her, proffering five autograph books. ‘Why five?’ Anna wanted to know. Further questioning brought out the news that the rest of the party were on the other side of the road, afraid to come over. ‘Why?’ asked Anna. ‘Well, miss… they said you would have a dagger in your waist belt! But I wasn’t afraid!’”

During her Hollywood return, Wong had campaigned to star in an adaptation of Joseph Hergesheimer’s Java Head, a bestselling novel about the star-crossed marriage of a Manchu noblewoman and a white American sailor. American studio Paramount had gone as far as announcing it as her next film, only for it to be quietly dropped, likely due in part to increasingly pernicious American attitudes towards depicting so-called ‘mixed’ marriages. And yet, Wong optimistically told the New York press, “I still would like to play the part.”

Their loss was to be Britain’s gain: producer Basil Dean’s successful 1929 stage collaboration with Wong on The Circle of Chalk led to his acquiring the rights to Paramount’s unwanted property, to which he cannily assigned screenwriter Gordon Wellesley for its adaptation. Wellesley was half-Cantonese, and would later go on to become the first definite writer of colour nominated for an Oscar; his own impending marriage to fellow screenwriter Kay Strueby may well have influenced his determination to depict the film’s interracial relationship as one not doomed to disaster by default.

With the censors’ earlier decree against ‘parti-coloured kissing’ having faded away, Java Head would provide a tantalising glimpse of where Wong’s career may have led had she remained in Europe. At the time, Hollywood’s more daring tastes were being sharply curtailed by a reactionary Production Code, one that would not only delay Java Head’s US release by nearly a year, but see it cut by 15 minutes. 

By then, Wong had long since returned to America, where she would see out the last quarter-century of her career; despite her enduring reputation here, she would make no further films in Britain.

Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention plays at BFI Southbank in September and October 2025.

Java Head screens with a discussion with season programmer Xin Peng and writer Marc David Jacobs on 17 September.