A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the real Chinese players who appeared alongside the yellowface leads of The Good Earth (1937) and promised that I would profile some of these forgotten actors.
First up is Lotus Liu. Her story is a little sad. She was actually chosen to play Lotus, one of the film's featured roles, but in the end lost the part to a white actress. Let's follow her promising, but ill-fated, trajectory to stardom before it finally missed its mark.
LOTUS LIU OF SHANGHAI
GETS SCREEN START
Young Unknown Only Chinese-Born Lead
in "Good Earth"
By BARBARA MILLER
— HOLLYWOOD
Shanghai, which gave the world — and Hollywood — the impudent Lyda Roberti, has produced another potential prodigy.
Her name is Lotus Liu and she will play Lotus, the Soochow sing-song girl and home-wrecker, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "The Good Earth". The 19-year-old unknown is the only China-born principal in a cast headed by Paul Muni (Austria) and Luise Rainer (Germany).
Unlike Roberti, product of Shanghai's famous cabaret system, Lotus comes to Hollywood with a French convent, English school background. Her father is Chinese, her mother American.
Seen on a Bus
Oriental in appearance, pleasantly English in accent, Lotus is strictly American in aspirations. Arriving here two years ago as a student, she probably would be fluttering masculine hearts on Southern California campuses if M-G-M's astute Billy Grady hadn't glimpsed her one afternoon on a bus.
Waiting for a bus does have its compensations after all. For since then, everything has been easy for Lotus. Though the studio tested thousands of girls for the part — American and European, as well as Chinese and Eurasian — her youth and vitality won the battle.
It's a break of a lifetime, this part, and Lotus knows it. Talking nineteen to the dozen, the other afternoon on the "Good Earth" set, she looked like one of the better college freshman in her military-minded gray suit and absurd scarlet handkerchief perched on her black curls. But her ambitions are adult. China's famous passiveness is conspicuously absent.
Father Not Told
Lotus is living in Beverly Hills, with her mother and two brothers. But her father, long in the service of the national government of China, is in Nanking. He hasn't been informed of his daughter's good fortune.
"You know how things are in China," she reminded me, wrinkling her pretty nose. After we had reminisced about our last meeting — on a windy Nanking road corner the day the Liu family left Shanghai for California — she continued, "It's so different being in pictures here. And government people are so conservative."
Originally the Nanking government didn't care a great deal for the Buck masterpiece. The poverty of China's peasantry is not the angle the younger, foreign-educated officials strive to present to the world. And the story of Wang Lung and his stolid, homely wife is the story of the soil: of mud huts and famine and marauding war lords sickeningly familiar outside the treaty ports.
Deleted by Experts
The film version, however, has been operated on by experts — for something like three years. Removal or modification of all episodes dealing with opium traffic, famine and banditry so pleased the powers at Nanking that the ill-fated George Hill and his technical experts shot exteriors all over China two years ago.
But the character of the predatory Lotus escaped unscathed, according to the girl who will play the part. Lotus is her real name. And she has a sister called Blossom.
"I'm just a so-and-so," she explained, with a characteristic shrug of her slim shoulders. "I get into Wang Lung's house as his second wife and live there in luxury. I even snatch his poor wife's favorite pearl earrings. But when the lord and master discovers that I'm getting too fond of his good-looking young son he rises up in his wrath and shouts "Go!" And that — I'm afraid — is the end of poor Lotus."
Such an ignominious end is all very well for Lotus, the Soochow charmer, a quaint little figure in her short silk jacket and baggy trousers, lotus flowers in her hair. But for Lotus Liu — with an American mother, a Chinese father and her own ideas of getting on in the world — it's only the beginning.
— San Antonio Express, May 10, 1936
More like the beginning of the end: it was soon reported in The San Antonio Light (June 20, 1936) that Lotus Liu was being replaced by Sidney Fox, best remembered today for her role as the damsel in distress in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). But then, just two weeks later (July 1, 1936), the paper followed up with the news that Lotus was back again for the role.
After signing Lotus Liu (an Eurasian beauty) for the role of Lotus in the picture, the powers-that-be suddenly had a brain storm and decided that Sidney Fox would make a better Lotus than a real Chinese girl so Miss Liu was out and Miss Fox was in. At least, temporarily. After two weeks of testing, Miss Fox was found unsatisfactory for the role and now Miss Liu is right back again and this time — she'll stay."
Well, no — not this time. Lotus was replaced once again by a white actress. This time it was Austrian dancer Tilly Losch, who ended up shooting the role. And here's the real kicker: according to one source I've found (Award-Winning Films of the 1930s by John Reid), Lotus Liu dubbed the lines for thick-accented Tilly Losch. Talk about sucks!
Alas, the "break of a lifetime" for this "potential prodigy" just disappeared into thin air. Nevertheless, even though Lotus Liu lost her chance to star in The Good Earth, she does appear briefly in the film. She's not listed in the cast credits on IMDB or the TCM movie database, but thanks to the Chinese Digest article (which I transcribed in my previous post), I was clued in to her 10 seconds of fame.
Here she is folks, making the absolute most of her meager screen time — the charming Miss Lotus Liu!
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