James B. Leong | |
Birth Name: | Leong But-jung |
Birth Date: | November 2, 1889 |
Birth Place: | Shanghai, China |
Death Place: | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Education: | Marion Normal College |
Occupation: | Actor, director |
Spouse: | Agatha Tarwater (m. 1934) |
James B. Leong (born Leong But-jung and sometimes credited as Jimmy Leong; November 2, 1889 —December 16, 1967) was a Chinese-American character actor and filmmaker who had a long career in Hollywood beginning during the silent era.
Leong was born in Shanghai, and he moved to the United States with his parents when he was young.[1] He graduated from Marion Normal College in Muncie, Indiana, in 1915[2] and briefly worked at a newspaper before moving to Hollywood, where he worked at first as a technical director for filmmakers like D. W. Griffith and Wesley Ruggles.[3] [4]
By 1919, he had started his own production company — James B. Leong Productions, later known as the Wah Ming Motion Picture Company — to show Chinese life as it really was.[5] He had grown tired of seeing Chinese people portrayed as kidnappers and assassins on the screen.[6] Under this banner, he wrote and directed the 1921 film Lotus Blossom.[7] During that time, he had said he planned to write and direct four films a year, though it never came to fruition, with a planned follow-up, The Unbroken Promise, never filmed.[8] [9]
He took work as an actor, playing smaller roles in Hollywood films, as well as continuing to work as a technical director and dialect coach.[10] He made money by growing silk crops in the 1940s.[11] [12]
He married Agatha Tarwater in 1934; the pair had a son together. Leong became a U.S. citizen in 1958.
As writer-director
As producer
As actor