words yvonne teh

Was the Empress Dowager Ci Xi as evil as she is often made out to be?

Coolies. That is Lisa Lu’s word for the type of roles she was offered by Hollywood for most of her acting career – one that had got off to an excellent start with a co-starring role opposite James Stewart in The Mountain Road (1960). But, then, she – who later won the Golden Horse Best Actress prizes for Cecille Tang Shu-Shuen’s The Arch (1970) and Li Han-Hsiang’s The Empress Dowager (1975) and a Best Supporting Actress award for The 14 Amazons (1972) – says, the offers in her adopted American homeland just stopped coming.

For a time, Lu was content to wait and try other alternatives, like performing Chinese Opera on California university campuses “to let the foreigners know about our total theatre”. The Beijing-born woman had studied financial administration at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and then worked in the financial field for five years in Honolulu. She started as a cashier and ended up as a financial comptroller but found it all so dull that she returned to school and took up acting – which led to bit parts on TV shows like Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza, Yancy Derringer, Hawaiian Eye and The Big Valley.

Eventually though, the actress says, “I got so frustrated.” Tiring of a situation in which, being a Chinese female, “You always play a coolie or you play a dragon lady. Or somebody from the laundry or restaurant, I wrote to Run Run Shaw and asked him whether I could come back [to Asia] and work in Chinese films because I speak fluent Chinese.” The first time around, however, the now 81-year-old lady recalls, “He didn’t return my mail!”

However, pioneering female director Cecille Tang Shu-Shuen did get in touch and cast Lu in the starring role of a widow obliged to suppress her desires for a man in favour of feudal and familial virtue in The Arch, a seminal and iconoclastic cinematic work seen by scholars as the precursor to the Hong Kong New Wave films of the late 1970s and 1980s. Then when Run Run Shaw visited Hollywood, Lu met him and “he invited me back to do The 14 Amazons (1972)”, a star-studded film inspired by the tale of the legendary females of the Yang clan who went into battle to serve their country after the death of their family’s males. One in which she played a 100-year-old Amazon clan matriarch!

Award-winning those two roles may have been, but Lu really cemented her place in the Chinese movie – one might even go so far as to say general pop cultural – pantheon with her memorable portrayal of Empress Dowager Ci Xi in Li Han-Hsiang’s The Empress Dowager (1975) and then again in the follow-up The Last Tempest (1976). So when Bernardo Bertolucci was looking for someone to play perhaps the most infamous Dragon Lady of them all in his The Last Emperor (1987), he found his Empress in her.

Lu estimates that she has played Empress Dowager Ci Xi six times. This includes in the HK Repertory Theatre’s De Ling & Empress Dowager Ci Xi. Premiering in 1998 with Lu headlining the production, this HK Rep classic, which tells of the relationship between the young, Western-educated Princess De Ling and the elderly, traditional Empress Dowager, is being revived for a fourth time this year – with performances in Hong Kong from June 21 to 24, before heading to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing for a July 3 to 6 run.

In many of her appearances, including in The Joy Luck Club (1993) and, more recently, as Jaycee Chan’s grandmother in Invisible Target (2007), Lu displays a gentleness and serenity that is the complete opposite of most people’s image of Empress Dowager Ci Xi. And my meeting with this venerable lady only confirms that persona is close to Lu’s own warm elegance. When asked, Lu admits with a laugh, “When Mr Run Run Shaw cast me in the first movie [about the Empress Dowager], when I first played her, he was faced with all kinds of opposition because nobody could see that I could play such a vicious lady! However I think that when you act, you do whatever the script requires you to do.”

“When I first got the job, when I first played her, I did read a lot of books about her – and also yeh sheh, the fabricated books.” After all that research into the notorious figure, Lu concluded, “Definitely there is the evil side of her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been where she was.” But unlike many others, Lu has also came to think that the woman she has embodied so much on stage and screen had what she calls “a lovely side”.

“When I read about her, I knew she had this other part. Every human being must have many kinds of emotions.” Lu feels that De Ling & Empress Dowager Ci Xi especially presents the many different sides of the Empress Dowager, and so gives the character dimensions many other works don’t. He Jiping, the playwright, Lu says, “has described her as a very knowledge-seeking, fervent person. She has wisdom, and she has deep love for her old friend, and also she is tolerant towards the Emperor Guangxu. And at the end of her life, she wished to change the situation. She wished to do something new but it was the end of her life and so too late.” For her, for the Qing Dynasty and for China.

What with the Empress Dowager Ci Xi and the Qing Dynasty in particular but, also, imperial rule in general not being exactly fondly looked upon by communists, how does the actress think De Ling & Empress Dowager Ci Xi will be received in Beijing? “I think they will like it,” she says, confidently, “because nothing like it has ever been produced in Beijing. For the last 10 years, no Qing Dynasty plays were presented on stage. And this is a very well-written one. It gives every character very, very rich dialogue to express personal feelings. And there is never a dull moment on the stage.”

Then Lu also mentions the quality of the actors in this HK Rep production. Indeed, with the likes of Fredric Mao (playing Emperor Guangxu) and Kenneth Tsang (as the Empress Dowager’s lover, Rong Lu) – two respected thespians she has worked with more than once – on board, it is easy enough to understand why she is of the opinion that “each one [of the principal cast] really is a star in his own right.” And even though she has not previously worked with Mercy Wong (who plays Princess De Ling), Lu has seen enough to decide that “she’s a very, very fine actress”. And that is particularly important, since even while Lu is first-billed, she believes that Wong’s role and hers are equally important; for even while De Ling is far less well known than Empress Dowager Cixi, Lu says the writer of this play wanted to emphasize that the princess was actually somebody quite special. Which we could just as well say about the wonderful Lisa Lu herself.

The HK Repertory Theatre’s De Ling & Empress Dowager Ci Xi will be performed from June 21 to 24 at the HK Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre. Showtime is 7:45pm. Tickets for the June 21 charity performance, all proceeds for which will go to Sichuan Earthquake relief, are not available for public sale. However, tickets for the rest of the shows are $320 to $210 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.