Ethnicity in Film: Luise Rainer, Nancy Kwan
The issue of ethnicity and movie roles came up to me a few years ago, while I was working on a biography of Mexican-born actor Ramon Novarro (above), Beyond Paradise. I'd read much about white performers playing non-white roles, but basically nothing about non-white actors playing white roles. Yet, back in those days it wasn't that uncommon. Although Novarro, for one, had a Mediterranean look, he clearly had some Indian blood as well. Dolores del Rio and Sessue Hayakawa were a couple of other non-white performers who played a varied of ethnicities — including Caucasian types — in their Hollywood films.
In Novarro's case, his Mexican background and mixed ethnicity didn't prevent him from playing characters of just about every nationality and ethnic group out there during his 15 years as a Metro Pictures/MGM star. For instance, Novarro was a Middle-Eastern Jew in Ben-Hur, an Italian-American in Huddle, an Egyptian in The Barbarian, a part-Pacific Islander in The Pagan, an Englishman in Across to Singapore, a Teutonic type in The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg, a Frenchman in Devil-May-Care, a Central European in The Prisoner of Zenda and The Night Is Young, a Romanian in The Cat and the Fiddle, a Chinese man in The Son-Daughter, etc. etc.
In some roles Novarro looked just fine, in others you had to stretch your imagination a bit (sometimes more than a bit) to believe him as, say, a Chinese student (above, with Helen Hayes and Louise Closser Hale in The Son-Daughter). Once you got past that, he was often thoroughly convincing and even more importantly never turned his characters, regardless of their ethnicity, into caricatures.
Many lament the fact that Anna May Wong didn't get to play Luise Rainer's part in The Good Earth. I don't. I lament the fact that Wong didn't get to play Paul Muni's part in that film. She and Rainer would have made a beautiful and much more believable couple. In fact, Wong could have played — and played better — every single Paul Muni role there was, from the title character in Scarface and the title subject in The Life of Emile Zola to the title character in The Last Angry Man and the title subject in The Story of Louis Pasteur.
I'm not kidding. And I'm willing to bet that Luise Rainer would agree with me. Or maybe not.
Photos: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer