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A jaundiced history
The early history of American movies made stars of dramatic and comedic performers. Popular on the silent, silver screen were such well-known people as Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. Yet few remember an actor named Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who in the 1910s and 1920s was one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, mostly for his roles as a romantic leading man. By the 1930s, he was forgotten as Asian men were no longer considered "proper" romantic leads. Asian women were also early leads in the movies. Chinese American Anna May Wong was a popular actress and "international fashion icon" in the 1920s, however, very quickly she was stereotyped as either the "evil Dragon lady" or the "demure, obedient daughter" and found few other positive roles.
As Asians began disappearing from movies in the 1930s, new "Asian" characters began appearing. The two most popular were Charlie Chan, a Chinese Detective who solved murder mysteries with "Oriental, Confucian wisdom" - a brilliant man who spoke of himself in the third person and who never mastered the use of English articles and pronouns. The other was Doctor Fu Manchu, an also brilliant, yet psychopathological villain bent on world domination. Charlie Chan was a creation of Earl Derr Biggers, and Doctor Fu Manchu, of Sax Rohmer. There have been over 50 major Charlie Chan movies and ten Doctor Fu Manchu movies created by major Hollywood studios, and the characters were never portrayed by Asians but were portrayed by Caucasians in "yellowface" makeup.
Many famous Hollywood stars played roles in "yellowface" including Myrna Loy, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Peter Lorrie, Paul Muni, Louise Rainer, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guiness, Jennifer Jones, Curt Jurgens, Marlon Brando, Ricardo Montalban, Yul Brynner, Rita Moreno, Mickey Rooney, Tony Randall, Peter Sellers, John Gielgud, David Carradine, Max von Sydow, Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Pryce, and Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Roland Winter, Ross Martin, Peter Ustinov as Charlie Chan, and Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Warner Oland as Doctor Fu Manchu[1] .
During the latter part of the twentieth century, blatant occurrences of "yellowface" are rare, however they are appearing in small roles as secondary characters. Actors Joel Grey, Rob Schneider, Christopher Walken, and Eddie Murphy have played...