Yang Likun

Biography

Yang Likun was a Chinese film actress of the Yi ethnic group, born in April 1941 in Mohei Town, Pu'er County, Yunnan Province. She grew up in a large family of 11 siblings and was the ninth child, earning her the nickname "Xiao Jiu'er." She began her artistic career in 1954 as a solo dancer in the Yunnan Provincial Song and Dance Troupe. In 1959, at age 18, she was selected by director Wang Jiayi of Changchun Film Studio to star in the lead role of the romantic comedy "Five Golden Flowers," which depicted the Bai people during the Great Leap Forward. The film premiered in December 1959 to immediate sensation, screened in 46 countries, won the Silver Eagle Award at the 2nd Alexandria Film Festival in 1960, and Yang Likun won the Best Actress Silver Eagle Award. In the following years, she was received by top leaders including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chen Yi, and toured abroad multiple times with the song and dance troupe. In 1964 she starred in the lead role of "Ashima," a film about an ancient love story of the Sani people of the Yi ethnic group in Yunnan. In 1965, just before the release of "Ashima," the Ministry of Culture banned the film for "not praising the socialist revolutionary situation" and "promoting bourgeois romanticism," and the prints were sealed away. Yang Likun had previously suffered a nervous breakdown due to obstacles in a romantic relationship and had recovered after hospitalization, but this campaign labeled her a "black element" and "black-line figure." During the Cultural Revolution she was persecuted and tortured, developed schizophrenia, disappeared for a time and wandered to the border town of Zhenyuan; after being found, her condition improved slightly. In 1970 she was labeled a "current counter-revolutionary" for some political remarks, causing complete mental collapse. In 1973 she married Tang Fenglou, a man of Shanghai origin. After the Cultural Revolution ended, she moved to Shanghai in 1978 and nominally served as an actress at Shanghai Film Studio, living a more stable life with some improvement in her condition. In July 2000 she died at her Shanghai home after prolonged illness and physical decline. She has two tombstones, one in Shanghai and one in Kunming, and her ashes were divided between the two.