Li Yuru

Li Shuzhen (25 July 1923 – 11 July 2008), better known by her stage name and also known as was a Chinese opera singer and actress. Descended from Manchu nobility, she is remembered as "one of the great Beijing Opera performers" and played an important role in the acceptance of female singers in female roles (dan). Amid the Cultural Revolution, she was imprisoned from 1966 until the early 1970s. In 1979, she married Cao Yu, one of the most important 20th-century Chinese dramatists, and, following China's reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping, she ended her life respected as one of the few surviving masters of the dan roles.

Life

Early life She was born in Beijing on 25 July 1923 When she was five, her mother remarried to a businessman named Jiao Dezhai.

The family was poor. When she was 9 or 10, they sent her to the National Drama School to learn a trade and receive meals. This school had been opened in 1930 as the first coeducational opera school in China and aimed to reform education of Peking opera singers and musicians. For the two centuries before women appeared on Shanghai's stages in the 1870s, female opera roles had been played by men. Because of the association with prostitution, the work was still stigmatized and female students, despite usually being driven into acting by poverty, had previously needed private tutors. The school was a more respectable setting but Jiao adopted her mother's assumed name of Li in order to avoid shaming her father. Along with the other members of the school's fourth class, Li then adopted a stage name incorporating the generation component "jade": Li Yuru. While there, Li memorized plays and participated in "arduous" physical exercises. She woke at 6 each morning (two hours ahead of the other students) and took extra classes. The audience had also become familiar with her. At age 14, she was given the gown and star role of the Princess in a performance whose lead and understudy had both lost their voices. She later recalled that, when she struck her first pose, before saying a line, "the applause and shouting started. It was so loud that my ears were rining. Afterwards, every line I sang or spoke and every eye expression I made would gain a full-house ovation". At 14, she was a "star student" and began "playing all types of leading roles", all the more so because the principal and registrar hadn't realized she'd learned the part ahead of the school's curriculum. Over the course of her training, Li studied about 40 hua dan ("flowery role") plays.

Graduating at age 17 in 1940, she established her own troupe with friends from the school. She organised a program of 62 new and traditional plays over a successful 48-day run in Shanghai, starring in 28 of them. Disliking the pressure she came under as an independent young actress, she disbanded the troupe and placed herself under the training and protection of older male actors: Xun Huisheng and Mei Lanfang, two of the "Four Great Dan"; Zhao Tongshan, the greatest "flowery" actor of the time; the "martial clown" Ye Shengzhang; the "educated clown" Ma Fulu; the "painted face" actor Jin Shaoshan; the "martial" actor Li Shaochun; the "Four Great Beards" Ma Lianliang, Tan Fuying, Yang Baosen, and Xi Xiaobo; and the other "old men" Zhou Xinfang and Tang Yunsheng. She also studied under the female impersonators Yu Lianquan and Cheng Yanqiu. The broad range of specialists expanded her repertoire greatly. During this period, Li gave successful performances of The Dragon and the Phoenix, The Courtyard of the Black Dragon, Two Phoenixes Flying Together, and Three Pretty Women. and to enjoy much better social status than in pre-war China. The troupe included Tong Zhiling and Yan Huizhu. She and her colleagues were planning to adapt her version into a full-length play in 1960 when Chen Yi, China's foreign minister at the time, asked that they make a "fundamental change to the premise of the play in order to utilize it for China's Cold War diplomacy." and sometimes compared to Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov. Being 14 years older, Cao often needed her care before his death in 1996.

In the 1980s, Li began writing. She first produced a full-length play, Love and Hatred, based on Wang Kui's betrayal of Jiao Guiying. She wrote columns for the Xinmin Evening News and Wenhui Daily and, in 1992, serialised the novel Pinzi. This was republished under the title Little Woman the next year and adapted as a 20-episode television miniseries in 1999. She also published two books on Peking opera, both of which she wrote after her second operation for lung cancer in 2007.

In 2007, Li was one of four recipients of the Great Achievement in Performing Arts award from the All-China Association of Literature and Arts, considered one of the "few living masters of the dan role".

Li died on 11 July 2008 in Shanghai.

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