ABSTRACT
The Republican period in China (1911-49) still holds many surprises, and the actor Li Lili (1915-2005) is one of them. Li Lili was one of the biggest stars of silent and sound film of the 1930s and 1940s in China. This chapter focuses on her film career at Lianhua Film Company from 1932 to 1937 through discussion of the films she acted in, the attention she received in popular media and memoirs from her later life. From her first films with Sun Yu, Li’s on-screen persona presents a combination of two qualities, lively (huopo) and jianmei, literally ‘healthy and beautiful’, a term with significant links to government social policy and emerging popular conceptions of female beauty. For early cinema, Li Lili represents an unprecedented type with links to female roles in traditional opera in China, song and dance performance, and emergent concepts about autonomy for women in society.
