2013 Essays
Tsuru Aoki
Tsuru Aoki is best remembered as the wife of Sessue Hayakawa, and certainly Aoki’s role as adoring wife on- and off-screen was extremely important to the remarkable success of Hayakawa as a romantic lead in the teens and early twenties. Hayakawa’s popularity rested on the assurance that his exotic and inscrutable Oriental exterior hid a soft and romantic side, proof of which was his “little wife.” But her star image was complex, erasing her immigrant background and presenting her as a model of assimilation, with her undeniably modern American lifestyle a sharp contrast to the diminutive Oriental “doll” aspects of her persona.
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More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Film
- Libraries
- Series
- Women Film Pioneers Project
- Published Here
- October 15, 2019