Ruan Lingyu

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Ruan

Ruan Lingyu (Chinese: 阮玲玉; pinyin: Ruǎn Língyù; April 26, 1910 – March 8, 1935) was a Chinese silent film actress. She was one of the most prominent Chinese film stars of the 1930s.

Born as Ruan Fenggeng (阮凤根) in Shanghai, Ruan made her first film at the age of 16 for the then prominent Mingxing Film Studio. Her first big break came in Spring Dream of an Old Capital (故都春梦 or Reminiscences of Beijing, 1930). A massive hit, it was her first major work after signing for the newly-formed Lianhua Studio.

Ruan in a postcard pose

Thereafter Ruan became the company's major film star. Her best works came after 1931, starting with the melodrama Love and Duty (directed by Bu Wancang). Beginning with Three Modern Women (三个摩登女性, 1932; dir: Bu Wanchang), Ruan started collaborating with a group of talented leftist directors; most of her subsequent films have a strong socialist slant to it. In Little Playthings (小玩意, 1933), a film by Sun Yu, Ruan played a long-suffering toy-maker. Her next film, Shennü (神女, The Goddess, 1934; dir: Wu Yonggang), is often hailed as the pinnacle of Chinese silent cinema, with Ruan's portrayal of a sympathetic prostitute one of the classics of the era. Later that year, Ruan made her last film, New Women (新女性), with director Cai Chusheng, where she played an educated woman forced to death by an unfeeling society.

Under massive pressure from street tabloids, retaliating for a scathing depiction of them in New Women, Cai was forced to make extensive cuts to the film. Ruan's private life was mercilessly hoarded upon and her on-going law-suit with her first husband a source of vindictive coverage. Faced with these and with intense private problems, Ruan poisoned herself with an overdose of barbiturates in Shanghai on March 8, 1935, at the age of 24. Her death note apparently contained a line which says "Gossip Is a fearful thing", although some have doubted the note's authenticity. Her funeral procession was reportedly three miles long, with three women committing suicide during it ^[1]. Even China's preeminent intellectual Lu Xun was appalled at the details surrounding Ruan's death, and wrote an essay denouncing the tabloids^[2].

A complete print of the presumably lost Love and Duty (1931) was discovered in the 1990s in Uruguay.^[3]

The director Stanley Kwan made a movie about her life in 1992, The New China Woman (aka. Centre Stage or Actress), starring Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu.