Chen Yumei

Chen Yumei (; born Fei Mengmin ; 1910–1985) was a Chinese film actress and singer active during the 1920s and 1930s. In her heyday she was one of the biggest stars in China, crowned "Movie Queen" in 1934. At the peak of her career she married Runje Shaw (Shao Zuiweng), the boss of Tianyi Film Company, and retired from acting. She was nicknamed the "frugal star" for her efforts at promoting the virtue of frugality.

Career Chen Yumei was born in the town of Menghe (孟河) in Changzhou, Jiangsu province in 1910. Her name at birth was Fei Mengmin (费梦敏).

Chen made her film debut at age 13, playing a minor role in the film Song Bai Yuan made by the film division of the Commercial Press in Shanghai. At age 15 she enrolled at the actress training school of the Laughter Stage, a theatre run by Runje Shaw (Shao Zuiweng), her future husband. In 1926 she joined Tianyi, the film studio recently founded by Shaw, and was selected by Shaw to play the starring role of Qiu Xiang in the film The Flirting Scholar . The film was not a great success, and Chen remained a secondary star of Tianyi after Hu Die (Butterfly Wu) and Wu Suxin . She starred in more than 30 movies made by Tianyi, most notably A Girl Named Yunlan (芸兰姑娘, 1932), Livelihood (生机, 1933), and The Struggle (挣扎, 1933). Many of her roles were of a tragic nature. During an interview, she named Livelihood, a progressive movie banned by the Shanghai Municipal Council, as one of her favourite films.

In 1934, the newspaper Movie Life organized the second poll for the "Movie Queen", and Chen Yumei won the title with 30,232 votes. However, it was alleged that Tianyi's boss Runje Shaw bought numerous copies of the newspaper and cast multiple votes to help her win. After the Second Sino-Japanese War destroyed Tianyi's business in Shanghai and the subsequent Communist victory in China, Shaw retired from film-making and later died in Shanghai in 1975. Chen kept a low profile and reportedly died in 1985.