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

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.