Anna May Wong

© William Hustler and Georgina Hustler / National Portrait Gallery, London

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Anna May Wong

by Dorothy Wilding
chlorobromide print on card mount, 1929
16 1/2 in. x 11 5/8 in. (418 mm x 295 mm) image size
Given by the photographer's sister, Susan Morton, 1976
Photographs Collection
NPG x26341

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Dorothy Wilding (1893-1976), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 2179 portraits, Sitter in 30 portraits.

This portraitback to top

Wilding recalled: ‘Anna May Wong ... had the first long red fingernails I had ever seen. When I lifted her hands to ‘drape’ them, they were so fragile that one felt one was holding the most delicate snowdrops. She was the softest and gentlest creature one can imagine.’

Linked publicationsback to top

  • 100 Photographs, 2018, p. 65 Read entry

    The actress Anna May Wong (1905-61) was born in Los Angeles to second generation Chinese-American parents. She appeared in over sixty films and is best known for her starring roles alongside Marlene Dietrich in Joseph von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) and in the classic British silent melodrama Piccadilly, released in 1929 - the year that leading photographer Dorothy Wilding (1893-1976) took this portrait. In her autobiography, In Pursuit of Perfection (1958), Wilding recalled: 'Anna May Wong … had the first long red fingernails I had ever seen. When I lifted her hands to “drape” them, they were so fragile that one felt one was holding the most delicate snowdrops. She was the softest and gentlest creature one can imagine.’

  • Edited by Rab MacGibbon and Tanya Bentley, Icons and Identities, 2021, p. 93

Placesback to top

Linked displays and exhibitionsback to top

Events of 1929back to top

Current affairs

The first election held under universal suffrage is a victory for Labour. Ramsay Macdonald returned for his second term as Prime Minster, and appointed Margaret Grace Bondfield as the first woman Cabinet Minister.

Art and science

Two classic books about the First World War are published: All Quiet on the Western Front, by war veteran, Erich Maria Remarque, tells of the horrors of war and the returning German soldiers' feelings of detachment from civilian life; while Robert Grave's autobiography Goodbye to All That, aimed to describe the author's experiences of the war so that they 'need never be thought about again'.

International

The 24th October 1929 becomes known as Black Thursday when the US Stock Exchange Collapses and millions are lost. The event was the start of the Wall Street Crash, which in turn contributed towards the Great Depression: a major international recession that lasted through most of the 1930s.

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