Bo Ling

Bo Ling "Bernice" Park was an American film actor who appeared in a number of films from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Biography Bo Ling was born in Alameda County, California, to Edward "E.L." Park and Oie "Florence" Chan. Both of her parents were actors and children of Chinese immigrants; E.L. appeared as Charlie Chan in the 1929 film Behind that Curtain and later served as an interpreter for the county of Los Angeles, while Florence appeared in a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s, including Charlie Chan films. When the family relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1920s, E.L. and Florence opened a Chinese restaurant on Alameda Street and owned their own Chinese costume store. The sisters performed in Las Vegas and around the country as a vaudeville act before settling in Hollywood and getting work as actors in the film industry. Their contemporaneous publicity materials often claimed the pair were born in China.

Bo's first known onscreen appearance was as a dancer in the 1928 film Red Wine. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she appeared in films and on Broadway.

She was the second wife of LeRoy Mason, an actor who appeared in many Westerns at Republic. The pair married in 1937; they separated at some point before his death in the 1940s, although they were still legally married.

Sometime after the 1950s, Bo Ling retired from Hollywood. At her home in Northridge, she had her own ceramics kiln. She died in 1999 in Granada Hills.

Selected filmography

Soldier of Fortune (1955) The Left Hand of God (1955) The Bamboo Prison (1954) Gobs and Gals (1952) Call Me Mister (1951) God Is My Co-Pilot (1945) Calling Philo Vance (1940) Captured in Chinatown (1935) 365 Nights in Hollywood (1934) International House (1933) Red Wine (1928)