Sixties actress Fang Ying passed away on Wednesday. While I've never followed her the way I have her fellow Shaw stars, I've always thought there was something special about her. I'm not sure how to describe it: she had the spunky innocence of Li Ching and the cool sophistication of Lily Ho — but in a way that was so understated and natural it was completely disarming.
While Fang Ying rose to fame in Shaw's huangmei opera films, I will always associate her with veteran director Yueh Feng's superb social melodrama Auntie Lan (1967), in which she plays a young woman who struggles with being a single mother after her fiance dies in a plane crash. She also starred in a movie that is tops on my list of still unavailable Shaw films that I'm dying to see: the tantalizing Trapeze Girl (1967).
Fang Ying in Trapeze Girl
One of Shaw's "Seven Fairies", the first crop of starlets from its actor training school, Fang Ying was — along with Allyson Chang Yen — the first to disappear from the silver screen. She married in 1968 and made a few more films before retiring in 1970.
In the mid-80s, however, Fang Ying returned to the movie business, this time as an art director and costume designer. She was nominated for Best Art Direction at the 10th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards for Kawashima Yoshiko (1990) but gets a special award from me for her work on two of my favorite films: Deception (1989), a stylish thriller about workplace blackmail spun out of control; and Naked Killer (1992), a lurid girls-with-guns film inspired by Shaw's erotic wuxia classic Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972).
Pauline Wong, Brigitte Lin, and Elizabeth Lee in Deception
Carrie Ng, Simon Yam, and Chingmy Yau in Naked Killer
Let me end with this brief tribute with a wonderful clip from Auntie Lan showing off Fang Ying's unaffected charm.
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