Xia Meng
| Xia Meng | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese name | 夏夢 (traditional) | ||||||||
| Chinese name | 夏梦 (simplified) | ||||||||
| Birth name | Yang Meng 楊濛 | ||||||||
| Born |
16 February 1933 Shanghai, Republic of China |
||||||||
| Died | 3 November 2016 (aged 83) | ||||||||
| Spouse(s) | Lin Baocheng 林葆誠 | ||||||||
|
Awards
|
|||||||||
Xia Meng (simplified Chinese: 夏梦; traditional Chinese: 夏夢; pinyin: Xià Mèng; 16 February 1933 – 3 November 2016), a.k.a. Hsia Moon and Miranda Yang, born Yang Meng (Chinese: 楊濛; pinyin: Yáng Méng), was a Hong Kong actress and film producer. She was a key figure of Hong Kong's Left Wing film scene.
Xia Meng was first exposed to drama and stage play at McTyeire School, an elite girls' school established by Methodist missionaries in Shanghai. In 1947, she moved with her family to Hong Kong, where she attended Maryknoll Convent School. In 1949, In conjunction with school's event, She was chosen to play the leading role in school's English-language production of Saint Joan.
In 1950, Yang Meng (as she was born) and her friends visited a film set of the Great Wall Movie Enterprises Ltd, and this was where she was first spotted by the crews, as well as studio manager Yuan Yang'an. Through the help of Yuan's daughter, Mao Mei (an actress and ballerina), Yang Meng accepted his invitation and joined the studio in the age of 17. Inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the new actress now renamed Xia Meng (literally "summer dream") by Yuan, which Yuan metaphorically wished her dream come true as she joined the studio in summer.
She was given her first role as the title character in Li Pingqian's A Night-Time Wife (1951). The comedy was a hit and rocketed Hsia Moon to stardom. Many other hits followed. There was the tragic demimondaine of Cao Yu's classic adaptation Sunrise, at her best as the virtuous widow of A Widow's Tears (both 1956), The scapegoat of the feudal moral value in the critically acclaimed Hong Kong classicThe Eternal Love (1960), the deprived bourgeoisie in HKFA Archival Gem's Romance of The Boudoir (1960), and perhaps most remarkably, her gender-bending turn as a man masquerading as a woman in The Bride Hunter (1960) as well as the one of the most memorable, a massive hit during its premiere in Singapore and Hong Kong, Princess Falls in Love (1962).
...
Wikipedia