Jadin Wong
| Jadin Wong | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 24, 1913 , California, US |
| Origin | California, USA |
| Died |
March 30, 2010 (aged 96) New York City, New York, US |
| Occupation(s) | singer, dancer, comedian. |
| Instruments | Body, hands, voice |
| Years active | 1930s-2010 |
Jadin Wong (May 24, 1913 – March 30, 2010) was an American singer, dancer, and comedian.
Wong was born in , after which the family moved to San Francisco, and ran away to Hollywood as a teenager. She started singing in public at 6 years old, where she was paid. At age 16, she ran away from home to Hollywood to become a dancer. On the night she ran away, her mother secretly left some hard-earned cash for her to support herself, despite her father's objection.
Wong married three times. Her first husband was Li Sun from Singapore, whom she divorced. She then married Edward Duryea Dowling. This was her longest marriage. More than a decade after his death, she married baseball champion Chichester.
Wong was a celebrity, diva and grand dame who discovered John Lone. She performed ballet right into her 90s, where she was caught by an interviewing journalist doing splits and pirouettes as "morning exercise". She studied with Balanchine and trained in classical ballet and jazz.
She was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at Lincoln Center, New York in winter of 2002. Her thank you speech quoted in The New York Times was, "Age is just a number, and I have an unlisted number." Ben Stiller has been quoted in the press as calling Jadin Wong the "original Dragon Lady", before Ziyi Zhang.
She performed in Hong Kong, Paris, Cuba, Germany and New York during her younger days in Charlie Low's Forbidden City.
In the 1970s she changed career again setting up the Jadin Wong Talent Management company, whose clients include David Henry Hwang, John Lone, Joan Chen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Lucy Liu and Bai Ling.
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