周坤玲

简介

Kwun-Ling Chow was born in 1924 in Hawaii, United States, to a tobacco merchant father. Her ancestral home is in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, and her older sister Catherine Joe is also a film actress. At age 21, she worked as a secretary at a San Francisco company during the day and acted in evening films at Grandview Film Company in San Francisco's Chinatown for $300 per film, earning the nickname "Chinese Hedy Lamarr" for her glamorous and sensual screen presence. Her screen debut was in the American Cantonese film "The Lovers' Reunion," and her second film "The Calamity of a Country" featured her in a leading role, gaining many fans in San Francisco and New York. In 1947 she began filming in Hong Kong, with her first local film "Fear of Seeing the Old Lover" premiering on November 27, 1947. In 1955 she co-starred with Cheung Ying in "Rear Window." By 1957 she had appeared in nearly 200 films in Hong Kong. In 1962 she stated she had acted in 20 films to date, with "Little Rich Girl" and "Little Matchmaker" being her most commercially successful, and she demonstrated martial arts skills in "The Demon Beauty" after months of training with a martial arts master. She was titled "Queen of Color Films" for her work in American color films but did not make color films after moving to Hong Kong. In 1966 she and her sister visited Hong Kong and Southeast Asia as youth women's leaders of an American Chinese association. She spent her later years in the United States, and reports in 2021 indicated she had passed away in 2020.