China: Shanghai actress Hu Die, also known as 'Butterfly Hu' (1907-1989), Shanghai, 1946

Hu Die (1907-1989) had a career as a film actress from the late 1920s to the 1960s. She had her most brilliant period in the 1930s and the 1940s. Early in the 1930s, she played the leading role in China's first sound film, The Singsong Girl , in which she portrays a kindhearted but somewhat ignorant woman who endures her husband's mistreatment and oppression without the slightest resistance. In The River Flows Rampant , the first film made by left-wing dramatists, she plays the role of Xiujuan, a woman who is filled with the spirit of resistance and has a rich inner world in her heart. Her performance won favorable comments. Hu Die played a full spectrum of characters, including a maidservant, a loving mother, a woman school teacher, an actress, a prostitute, a dancing girl, the daughter of a rich family, a laboring woman, and a factory worker. She had attractive, unconventional qualities, and her performances were gentle, honest, refined and sweet. Audiences call her a film queen. Hu Die lived both in the silent and sound film periods, and she was one of the most popular Chinese film actors and actresses in the 1930s and the 1940s.