William Holden

William Holden, the movie star, was born (William Beedle, Jr.) in 1918 in O’Fallon, Illinois, a small town in the southern part of the state near St. Louis, Missouri.  His family moved to South Pasadena, California when Holden was three years old.  After graduating South Pasadena High School, Holden started acting in local theater groups.  He was discovered by a talent scout for Paramount Pictures in 1937.

Holden’s first starring role was as a violinist turned boxer in the 1939 film, Golden Boy, with Barbara Stanwyck.  His career really took off after he was cast as an unemployed Hollywood screenwriter in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950 (see my blog post of November 1, 2015).  For this role Holden earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (lost to Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac).  Three years later in 1953, he won an Academy Award for his performance as an American soldier in a German POW camp during World War II in the film, Stalag 17.  In 1976, he received his third and final nomination for an Academy Award as Best Actor portraying a TV news executive in the film, Network (lost to his co-star, Peter Finch). 

In a movie career that lasted 43 years, Holden made many other memorable films such as Our Town, Born Yesterday, Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Country Girl, Picnic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Horse Soldiers, The Wild Bunch, and The Towering Inferno.  Tragically, he died alone and intoxicated at his home in Santa Monica, California in 1981 (at the age of sixty-three, same age and year as Richard Boone) after “slipping on a rug, severly lacerating his forehead on a table, and bleeding to death.”  His body was discovered four days later.

In 1955 and 1960, Holden made two movies that were both filmed on location in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.  The first was Love is a Many-Splendored Thing with Jennifer Jones (see my June 5, 2016 blog post, Peck and Jones) and the second was The World of Suzie Wong with Nancy Kwan.

In the first movie, Holden portrays a married (but separated from his wife) American war correspondent who falls in love with a Eurasian medical doctor played by Jennifer Jones.  Her character was based on a true story written by Dr. Han Suyin (the woman of the story), whose father was Chinese and whose mother was Flemish.  Of course, Jones was not Eurasian, but American audiences then didn’t seem to care.  She was a great actress and it was just accepted that she was Eurasian in the film, with a little help from Hollywood make-up. 

In the second movie, Holden portrays a struggling American painter who comes to Hong Kong looking for subjects to paint to prove to himself whether he has any talent.  He meets and falls in love with a local prostitute, Suzie Wong, played by Nancy Kwan, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was British.  Nancy is Eurasian, but she was portraying a 100% Chinese woman in the movie.  I am of the opinion that to American movie makers and American movie audiences at that time Eurasian was more “acceptable” than Asian.  In reality, Kwan should have portrayed Dr. Han Suyin in the first movie, a Eurasian portraying a Eurasian.

The main theme in both films deals with a taboo, a white man romantically involved with a woman who is not white (see my August 21, 2016 blog post, South Pacific), in these cases, 50% Chinese and 100% Chinese.  The films attempt to break down such a taboo by having the protaganist, Holden, refuse to give up the women he loves, Jones and Kwan.  I think the films succeed because they create sympathy for the characters in love.  In addition, the films succeed because we get to see the beauty of Hong Kong.

In 1997, Chinese-American Director Wayne Wang (named after John Wayne) made a film called Chinese Box which starred Jeremy Irons (English actor) and Gong Li (Chinese actress).  It is also a love story (again set in Hong Kong, this time during the final days before the UK turned it over to the People’s Republic of China) between a British journalist (similar to Holden in the first above film) and the Chinese bar girl (similar to Kwan in the second above film) he is in love with.  There is still the everpresent issue of forbidden interracial love between a white man and a Chinese woman, but at least here the movie audience sees the reality of a fully Chinese actress portraying a fully Chinese character.  Progress is being made.