Lady Tsen Mei, of China (1918) 🇺🇸
Tsen Mei was born in the quaint old city of Canton. One senses her Eastern mystery in the long slant of her eyes and the half-veiled fires that glow there when the requirements of expressing character call for varied emotions. But off stage, the Lady Tsen Mei loses her mystery, and becomes a wholesome, charming, freshly enthusiastic girl.
She comes to us as a surprise, for we have been told her story and the measure of her accomplishments, and the array of her talents is more than a little formidable.
Those who doubt the efficacy of the higher education for women cannot take Tsen Mei as an example of the failure of such education, for knowledge and degrees and success have not spoiled her; her entire lack of egotism is delightfully appreciable, while the gentle dignity with which she carries herself in moments of repose shows poise rather than conceit; and she flings self-possession to the winds like a happy child when the chance comes for a wild canter or an exhilarating swim.
The little lady from Canton has a father who is now a practising physician in Pittsburgh. He came to America when Tsen Mei was very little, and studied at Jefferson Medical College. Then he went back to China, and after a short while, returned to America for good; so that his daughter received most of her education in this country.
Having a vocal gift of rather unusual quality, she attended the Pittsburgh Musical Conservatory, where she developed a voice-range that goes from baritone to lyric soprano, and includes male tenor, to which she adds the ability to imitate to the life the call of any animal or bird that the woods can produce.
Today Tsen Mei is known in the best vaudeville circles for the work she has done, and her tours have embraced most civilized countries. But before she went on vaudeville circuit she performed other tasks of no small significance; for instance, she completed the law course at Columbia College, New York, and was duly admitted to the bar, though she never practiced. For in the meanwhile, sociology had come to engage her attention, and so she sought to see for herself something of the problems of the working-girl in the great city, and to that end she learned stenography and took a position with a broker in Wall Street, where she outdistanced many more experienced stenographers in speed and accuracy.
The call to the stage, however, would not be stilled. She loved to sing; wherefore she started on vaudeville circuit and made that her career. And the travelling she did was just so much more in the way of education, for Tsen Mei has the ability to observe and to absorb, and wherever she went she took something by way of knowledge and style and fascinating interest away with her.
With the result that she boxes with a strength and rapidity that makes her the equal of the average male boxer; she wrestles with intelligence and an agility that give her victory under the most harrassing conditions; she rides and she swims; she climbs and she drives an automobile; all with a dash and a verve that are astonishing to those who have seen her in a low-cut evening gown and have noted the satin smoothness of her shoulders, which give no hint of the iron muscles beneath.
It was in Australia that the call came to Tsen Mei to come back to the West and try motion picture work. The idea appealed to her. Here was the chance to create a thousand different roles; a chance to express a thousand different kinds of character to millions of people. Tsen Mei is ambitious, and she has a histrionic gift that the vaudeville stage gave her little opportunity to develop; now she could develop this other art to the full. With high enthusiasm she crossed a sea and a continent, and brought up at Betzwood, where, in the old Lubin studios, now out of use for some years, the Betzwood Film Company is starting to make big pictures.
At Betzwood, Tsen Mei is in her element. In the midst of a tract of the most beautiful country, the studios offer a unique opportunity for picture making. There are some sixty acres of land, and through them runs the Schuylkill River, heavily wooded on both sides, with low-rising hills crowned with giant trees, and low-lying fields that in spring and summer are gorgeous with wild flowers. Here are scenes for almost any kind of play, from Western ranch stuff to subtle Chinese garden effects; in fact, everything but seashore can be given a background right on the premises. And the woods and the hills and the trees, with the flowers and the birds, 'give the call to Nature that finds so ready a response in the heart of Tsen Mei. Here she can ride and run and climb and dance; here she can play among the treetops and set the woods ringing with her wild animal calls. And fresh and excited and playful, she comes to the studio to step into some scene of subtle intrigue or deeply tense emotion, and under a passive exterior that is typically Eastern we sense the fires of pathos and passion that give this little actress force and soul-power, and show the promise of work to come that will reveal a new force in screen interpretations.
Tsen Mei plays a Chinese role in her first picture, For the Freedom of the East; but she will not stop at Chinese characters. Her second picture will most likely be a South Sea Island story, and she has the will to do all manner of picturesque and forceful characters. She is familiar with practically every type of Oriental character, and she could carry off the part of an American girl or an European equally well; for her cosmopolitan training has given her a variety of expression and an ability to dress that makes her range of parts almost limitless. She has the style of a Parisian when she chooses to exhibit it; she has the haunting force of a wild creature should she wish to throw off the self-poise that sits so regally upon her; she has the gift of conveying mystery that would make her admirable in a part that involved intrigue; she could, we believe, “vamp” if the notion of doing so pleased her.
The first picture to be released for her has scenes in both China and America. The Chinese scenes are elaborate to gorgeousness; a well-known Philadelphia gallery supplied untold treasures to be employed in the settings. The American scenes suggest Washington, with a German secret service man, and bring the heroine from her beautiful home in China and her princely native suitor into the midst of plots and counterplots that surround the young American attaché, with whom she promptly falls in love. Her act of renunciation, and her return to her Chinese wooer, are carefully worked out, Tsen Mei herself giving the real power to the story through her careful, subtle acting, that conveys so much not actually pictured. For that is the gift of Tsen Mei, that without doing a great deal, she can convey much, and in the pictures that she will make this characteristic will doubtless be the one to grow. She has the intelligence that makes the histrionic gift great, in that with restraint she can create the impression of smoldering fires likely to burst into conflagration, and deeps of emotion that swell to floodtide proportions without breaking their bounds. Tsen Mei is an artist. It is this artist in her that will make her a motion picture actress to reckon with.
Lady Tsen Mei in repose
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1918