Huang Zongying
Huang Zongying | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 黄宗英 | |||||||||
 Huang Zongying and Zhao Dan in Rhapsody of Happiness (1947) | |||||||||
| Born | 13 July 1925 Beijing, China | ||||||||
| Occupation(s) | Actress, writer | ||||||||
| Notable work | Rhapsody of Happiness Crows and Sparrows Women Side by Side | ||||||||
| Spouses | Yi Fang, Cheng Shuyao, Zhao Dan, Feng Yidai | ||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 黃宗英 | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 黄宗英 | ||||||||
| |||||||||
Huang Zongying (Chinese: 黄宗英; born 13 July 1925) is a Chinese retired actress and writer. She starred in many black-and-white films such as Rhapsody of Happiness (1947), Crows and Sparrows (1949), Women Side by Side (1949), and The Life of Wu Xun (1950), all co-starring her husband Zhao Dan.
She began writing film scripts in the mid-1950s, and later became an acclaimed writer of reportage literature. She won the National Award for Outstanding Reportage Literature three times. Some of her works have been translated into English.[1]
Early life
Huang was born in Beijing in 1925, into a prominent gentry family originally from Rui'an, Zhejiang Province. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were both holders of the jinshi degree, the highest degree of the imperial examination. Her father Huang Cengming was an engineer who studied in Japan, and her mother Chen Cong was a well-educated housewife. Both her parents held liberal values and allowed their children to pursue their own interests.[2] However, her father died when she was nine and her family fell into poverty.[3]
Strongly influenced by her eldest brother, Huang Zongjiang, who would become an accomplished playwright, Huang Zongying developed a passion in arts and literature. Moved by Bing Xin's essay "To Young Readers", she wrote an essay "Under a Big Tree" in response, which was published in a weekly magazine. She was nine years old.[2]
Career
1940s: acting career
In 1941, Huang followed her brother Zongjiang to Shanghai, where she became a stage actress in Huang Zuolin's theatre company. She debuted in Cao Yu's play Metamorphosis,[4] and rose to fame in the comedy Sweet Child.[5]
In 1947, she made her screen debut in Shen Fu's film Pursuit, before starring in her breakthrough film Rhapsody of Happiness, by the famous director Chen Liting and writer Chen Baichen.[4] She portrayed the heroine, a woman forced into prostitution and drug dealing in war-torn China, with great skill, capturing both the degeneracy and the kindness of the character's complex nature. The male lead was her future husband Zhao Dan, China's most celebrated male actor of the time.[4]
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Zhao Dan was imprisoned by the warlord Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang for five years. Believing the widespread rumour that he had been killed by Sheng, his wife had remarried. Meanwhile, Huang was trapped in an unhappy marriage, forbidden by her husband and mother-in-law to act. She had fled her family in Beijing to pursue her acting career in Shanghai.[4] She and Zhao fell in love when filming Rhapsody of Happiness and they married on the New Year's Day of 1948. Numerous filmmakers and actors attended their wedding, which was presided over by the prominent director Zheng Junli.[6]
Soon after their marriage, Huang and Zhao both joined the Kunlun Film Studio, run by the underground Communist Party of China. In less than two years, she acted in several acclaimed films including Women Side by Side and Crows and Sparrows, portraying a diverse range of roles including a revolutionary, a teacher, a prostitute, and a mistress of a government official. Huang and her husband were at the forefront of an era that has been recognized as a golden age of Chinese cinema.[6]
Communist China: writing career and persecution
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Huang switched to writing as her main career, which was also her childhood passion. She published her first prose collection, Onward Moves the Peace Train, in 1951, followed by two more collections, Stories of Love and A Girl. She did not play a major role after the 1953 film Bless the Children. Under Mao Zedong's directive that "the arts must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers", Chinese films became dominated by stereotypical proletarian "heroes" with few roles suitable for her.[6] Beginning in 1954 she wrote the film scripts for An Everyday Occupation (1955) and The First Spring of the 60s.[7]
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who had been an actress in the 1930s, launched a campaign to persecute her former Shanghai colleagues who were familiar with her past. Many of Huang and Zhao's friends in the film and drama industry were driven to death, including Zheng Junli, Cai Chusheng, and Wang Ying. Zhao Dan, among the first to be targeted, was imprisoned for five years, during which Huang had no idea whether he was still alive. She remained free, but was frequently targeted by the Red Guards for physical abuse. Her family, with more than ten people, lived in one small room and had to survive on only 30 yuan a month. Even her own children were driven to denounce her and her husband as "counterrevolutionaries".[7]
After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Zhao Dan was politically rehabilitated and returned home. Huang resumed her writing and was elected to the executive committee of the China Writers Association. She focused on the reportage genre, which she had begun writing in 1963 but was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Instead of the famous and the successful, she chose her subjects mainly among the common people, especially intellectuals who quietly struggled for their ideals but were belittled and denounced by the society.[8] She often applies scriptwriting techniques, such as switches and flashbacks, to her reportage, and enriches her writing with poetic lyricism.[9] She won the National Award for Outstanding Reportage Literature three times, for her works Feelings of the Wild Geese, Mandarin Oranges, and The Wooden Cabin.[8]
Personal life
Marriages
Huang Zongying was married four times. She married her first husband, the conductor Yi Fang (异方), when she was 18, without knowing he suffered from congenital heart disease. He died of a heart attack only 18 days after the wedding.[10][11]
In 1946, she married the playwright Cheng Shuyao, who was from a rich but old-fashioned family which Huang found repressive. She divorced Cheng and married Zhao Dan in 1948, while Cheng married the actress Shangguan Yunzhu. The two couples remained close friends.[10][11]
Huang considers her 32-year marriage to Zhao Dan the most important of her life, and raised Zhao's two children from his previous marriage. According to her stepdaughter Zhao Qing, she treated her stepchildren like her own. Zhao Dan died from cancer in 1980.[10][11]
In 1993, when she was 68, Huang married for the fourth time, to the writer Feng Yidai zh (1913–2005).[10][11]
Adoption of Zhou Xuan's sons and lawsuit
In September 1957, the famous actress and singer Zhou Xuan died at the age of 39, leaving behind two young sons, Zhou Min and Zhou Wei. Huang Zongying adopted the two boys and raised them to adulthood. In November 1986, however, Zhou Wei sued Huang for his mother's inheritance worth about 120,000 yuan, which was a huge sum in 1980s China.[12] Zhou Min, on the other hand, sided with Huang and condemned his brother, even questioning whether he was truly Zhou Xuan's son, as she had suffered mental illness before her death and the circumstances surrounding Zhou Wei's birth and the identity of his father were murky. According to Huang's court statements, she had kept Zhou Xuan's property in safe custody and did not distribute it to the brothers because of the dispute between them.[12]
In December 1988, the Shanghai Intermediate People's Court ruled that Zhou Wei was Zhou Xuan's biological son and entitled to half of her inheritance. It also ruled that Huang had violated Zhou Wei's rights when she failed to distribute to him Zhou Xuan's property or disclose details about the property when he reached adulthood. The court ordered Huang to pay Zhou Wei 80,000 yuan.[12]
Legacy
In 2005, the centenary of Chinese cinema, the China Film Association organized a vote for China's best actors in history. Huang Zongying and her husband Zhao Dan were both named among the "100 best actors of the 100 years of Chinese cinema".[13]
In 2006, Peng Xiaolian directed Shanghai Rumba which is loosely based on the love story of Huang Zongying and Zhao Dan.[14] In 2017, Peng directed another feature titled Please Remember Me which also highlights their relationship. Huang Zongying appears as herself in this film.[15]
References
- ^ Zhang (1983), p. 47.
- ^ a b Lee (1998), p. 248.
- ^ Zhang (1983), p. 51.
- ^ a b c d Lee (1998), p. 249.
- ^ Song (2013), p. 145.
- ^ a b c Lee (1998), p. 250.
- ^ a b Lee (1998), p. 251.
- ^ a b Lee (1998), p. 252.
- ^ Lee (1998), p. 253.
- ^ a b c d Mo, Q i (2 January 2017). "92岁黄宗英出文集：从影星到作家，以及她的传奇一生". Thepaper.cn. Retrieved 6 February 2018.
- ^ a b c d "《可凡》黄宗英：我活着就不能让赵丹"死"了". Netease (in Chinese (China)). 8 May 2015. Retrieved 6 February 2018.
- ^ a b c "周璇遗产案黄宗英败诉 周伟获赔偿". Sina (in Chinese). 19 September 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2018.
- ^ "中国电影百年百位优秀演员" [100 Best Actors of the 100 Years of Chinese Cinema]. Sina (in Chinese). 13 November 2005.
- ^ "Faster Cha Cha for Shanghai Rumba", Shanghai Daily, 5 January 2006
- ^ "Pingyao Year Zero: A Report from China's First Authority-Approved, Privately Operated Film Festival". Filmmaker. 2 January 2018.
Bibliography
- Lee, Lily Xiao Hong (1998). Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century, 1912-2000. M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-0-7656-0798-0.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Song, Yuwu (5 July 2013). Biographical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-0298-1.
{{cite book}}: Invalid|ref=harv(help) - Zhang, Jie (1983). Seven Contemporary Chinese Women Writers. Translated by Gladys Yang. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-2959-6017-3.
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