Nancy Kwan: Actress
Nancy Kwan, born May 19, 1939, is a Chinese American actress who broke racial barriers when she became a Hollywood star playing romantic leads in the 1960s.
Before Michelle Yeoh, before Lucy Liu, before Ming-Na Wen, there was Nancy Kwan, whose first screen role in The World of Suzie Wong in 1960 catapulted her to fame and launched her remarkable career.
In the 1960s, Hollywood was a mostly white, male- dominated industry on and off the screen. Diversity was not even mentioned. The only star of color was Sidney Poiter, the first African American actor nominated for an Oscar® in 1958 for The Defiant Ones, win in 1963 for the Lilies of the Field.
Nancy Kwan, on the other hand, was an unknown young Eurasian woman who had never even lived in the United States. In her first film, she played a prostitute in Hong Kong who falls in love with an American artist. Reviewers and many Asian Americans panned the film for stereotyping Asian women. Despite the movie’s flaws, Kwan’s on-screen presence combined with her magnetic beauty, connected with movie goers, making The World of Suzie Wong a box office hit.
Nancy Kwan was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, one of two children and the only daughter of Kwan Wing-Hong, a Chinese born architect and Marquita Scott, a Scottish model. The two met in London when Kwan’s father was studying at Cambridge University. They married and moved to Hong Kong to start a family and a new life. But the marriage didn’t last and in 1941 with war looming, the family split up. Fearing an invasion of Hong Kong by the Japanese, Kwan’s father took the children to live in mainland China, while her mother returned to Britain. They later divorced.
Kwan was six when the war ended in 1945. Her family returned to Hong Kong where her father picked up his career in earnest. She had a comfortable, tomboyish childhood that included private school, sports and riding horses. At twelve, her interests changed, and she set her heart on becoming a ballet dancer. Her father enrolled her in a boarding school in London, and along with her regular classes, she took dance lessons. She auditioned with the prestigious Royal Ballet School, and she was accepted at 16. After four years, Kwan graduated with a teaching certificate and headed home to Hong Kong with dreams of opening a dance studio.
In 1959, Kwan learned there would be a screen test of some of her favorite Chinese actors and actresses at a studio her architect father, had built. She stood in the wings to star-gaze. That was where legendary producer Ray Stark discovered her.
Stark was scouting and casting for the movie adaptation of The World of Suzie Wong, which was having a successful Broadway run. While most assumed that actress France Nuyen -- who played Suzie on stage opposite a young William Shatner as artist Robert Lomax -- was the shoo-in for the movie role, Stark had other ideas.
Stark was seeking “an Asian actress who would be universally appealing.” In the 1960s, Asians were rarely seen on the big screen. When they did appear, women were stereotyped as exotic and seductive. Men were cast as servants and sidekicks.
Despite her lack of acting experience, after four screen tests, Stark saw enough potential in Kwan to offer her a contract, which included attending acting school in Los Angeles. Kwan’s father balked at the idea of having his daughter, barely out of her teens, living alone in the fast world of Hollywood. But he gave in when Stark found her a place to stay at The Studio Club, a chaperoned all -women’s dormitory for young actresses.
After she finished acting school, Kwan’s career took off. Stark offered her a seven-year contract, at $300 a week, the equivalent of $3,100 today. She landed a minor role as a bar girl in the Broadway play of Suzie Wong and as an understudy to Nuyen.
When the show began touring, Nuyen was in production for the movie and Kwan replaced her on stage. In Toronto, Kwan got a phone call from Stark. Things on the set, Stark said, were not working out. Nuyen was out and if Kwan could pass another screen test, which she did, she would be the new Suzie Wong.
When the film was released in 1960, it got mixed reviews but at the end of the year, Kwan received two Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in a Drama (she lost) and Most Promising Newcomer, which she won, cementing her new starlet status.
Kwan followed up her success the next year by starring in movie version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Flower Drum Song. If Asian Americans were upset that she had shot to fame portraying a promiscuous young woman, Kwan changed that image as Linda Low, a showgirl in a romantic comedy set in modern San Francisco. The directors dubbed her singing with another actress’ voice, but the movie showcased Kwan’s dancing talent.
The Flower Drum Song also was notable for making Hollywood history on several levels. It was the first movie about Asian Americans starring an all-Asian cast, except for Juanita Hall, an African American who played Madame Liang. The script featured the romances of two couples – four Asian actors who spoke fluent English, not broken English and could sing and dance as fluidly as any white actor. And while it was a simplistic portrayal of Chinese Americans, the story had a key issue that still resonates today: illegal immigration.
In 2018, when playwright David Henry Huang staged an updated revival of The Flower Drum Song on Broadway, the significance of the original play and movie was in the news.
“I’ve always loved the film,” said Kwan, “because I think it was very groundbreaking, looking back, for Asian Americans…It opened a lot of doors for the actors, people in the business.” However, she noted, more than five decades later, “It’s still unusual today to see all Asians singing and dancing.”
For the rest of the decade, Kwan continued to star in several other movies, mostly light romantic comedies. None matched the commercial success of her first two movies; however, she was able to play characters that weren’t Asian stereotypes, a goal that Ray Stark had in mind when he signed her. In The Main Attraction (1962) she was an Italian circus performer, in Honeymoon Hotel (1964) she was the hotel’s social director and in Fate is the Hunter (1964) she played a scientist.
Through her early success Kwan became a style icon. The body-fitting Chinese cheong-sam dress she wore in her film debut for Suzie Wong became a sought-after design. And when Sassoon cut her long hair into a geometric bob for her role in The Wild Affair, it made the pages of Vogue and women began asking for the “Kwan cut.”
In the seventies, Kwan moved to Hong Kong to take care of her ailing father. She was an even bigger star in Asia than in the United States and an astute businesswoman. She created a production company that produced ads for the south Asian market and was able to make a few movies for the Asian movie industry.
She was back in America in the 1980s, but movie opportunities for Asian actors were still limited. Instead of Hollywood, she found work in TV shows such as Hawaii Five-O, The A Team, Fantasy Island, Noble House and ER. In 1993, she turned down a role in the movie The Joy Luck Club because the directors refused to cut one of the character’s lines that described The World of Suzie Wong as “a horrible…racist film.”
For generations of Asian Americans, Nancy Kwan remains a movie icon. For decades, while Hollywood sidelined actors and directors of color, her movies stood out as a moment in time when the movie industry could have pursued diversity. After The Flower Drum Song, it would be another 57 years before there would be another Hollywood blockbuster film about Asians and Asian Americans with an all-Asian cast: Crazy Rich Asians. Released in 2018, it was written by Kevin Kwan, a distant cousin to Nancy Kwan.
In 2022, Everything Everywhere All At Once, a genre breaking film with a mostly Asian cast was released. A critical and box office hit, it picked up multiple awards, including 11 Oscar nominations and seven wins. As of March 2023, it grossed more than $140 million in worldwide revenues.
©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project