Li Lili

Li Lili (; 2 June 1915 – 7 August 2005) was a Chinese film actress and singer. Her films Playthings, The Great Road and Storm on the Border were blockbusters of the 1930s and 1940s. She was sometimes called "China's Mae West".

Her films Volcanic Passions (1932), Playthings (Little Toys) (1933), Daybreak (1933), Sports Queen (1934), and The Great Road (The Big Road) (1934) are available with English subtitles on YouTube.

Biography

Li was born Qian Zhenzhen in Beijing, 1915. Her father, Qian Zhuangfei, was a famed secret agent and member of the Chinese Communist Party. After troupe was merged into the Lianhua Film Company in 1931, Li became an actress. She starred in Sun Yu's 1932 Loving Blood of the Volcano, set in the South Seas with plenty of dancing, which allowed Li to play to her strengths. She and Wang Renmei then acted together in Poetry Written on the Banana Leaf. Magazines characterized her as being interested in music and books. From 1935 to 1937, she starred in eight more films with the Lianhua Film Company.

Li Lili, together with Wang Renmei and Xu Lai, her former colleagues at the Bright Moon Troupe, were the earliest stars to portray the energetic, wholesome, and sexy "country girl" prototype, which became one of the most popular figures in Chinese cinema, and later inherited by the cinema of Hong Kong.

After war with Japan broke out in 1937, she joined the China Film Studio in Chongqing, China's wartime capital. There she met and married Luo Jingyu, a section head, who became head of the studio. In 1939, she filmed Cai Chusheng's Orphan Island Paradise in Hong Kong; it was another hit. Back in Chongqing, she starred in another hit film Storm on the Border, for which she was highly praised.

During the Cultural Revolution, Li and her husband, Luo Jingyu, were denounced and tortured on the orders of Mao's wife Jiang Qing. Li had acted with her, and outshone her, in films such as Blood on Wolf Mountain. Li later told her family that she refused to denounce anyone.

In 1991, she was given the "Special Honour Award" by the Chinese Academy of Motion Picture Arts.

By the end of her life, Li Lili was the last living Chinese movie star from the silent era. She died of a heart attack in Xuanwu Hospital, Beijing on August 7, 2005, aged 90.

Filmography