A shabby but very beautiful Chinese scullery maid with rips in her tights is called into a nightclub impresario's office. She thinks she is about to be sacked, but the nightclub boss's lust for her is obvious. He can't keep his eyes off her legs. Rather than fire her, Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas) offers her a job as the top-of-the-bill exotic dancer in his ailing club, the Piccadilly. Thus is launched the spectacular but shortlived career of Shosho (Anna May Wong) in EA Dupont's Piccadilly (1929). This heady melodrama, shortly to be re-released in a restored version with a live score, is the quintessential Wong vehicle. It sums up why audiences cherished her and why the film industry was so fiercely suspicious of her.
As her biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges puts it, "her movies are almost always a representation of social fears about interracial sex". In Piccadilly , her effect on Wilmot is roughly akin to that of Louise Brooks's Lulu on the menfolk in Pandora's Box. The besotted impresario ignores his "flapper" mistress Mabel (Gilda Gray) so that he can spend more time with Shosho, "the Chinese Dancing Wonder". He accompanies her to Limehouse, where he pays a small fortune for the elaborate costume in which she will perform. The film-makers don't downplay the racism the couple encounter. We see Valentine and Shosho together in a rough East End club, which they are forced to leave after one drunken white woman is attacked for having the temerity to dance with a black man.
What's striking about Wong's Shosho is her defiance. At 5ft 7in, she's as tall as her leading man. She is not meek or deferential in her lover's presence, but takes his worship of her as her natural right. Nor is she in the slightest cowed when her rival Mabel visits her apartment and begs her to break off the affair. "He's too old for you," the spurned woman tells Shosho. "You're too old for him," she snaps back.
Shosho may be a femme fatale who comes to a very bloody end, but at least she is allowed a romantic life. Too often in Wong's movies, especially the Hollywood ones, she is kept away from the leading men altogether, as if she presented some kind of toxic threat toward them. That was certainly the case in The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Douglas Fairbanks's celebrated Arabian Nights fantasy in which she was cast, true to type, as a treacherous Mongol slave girl. Here, she is dressed in typically outlandish fashion: in a black bikini. Her black hair is tied up in ringlets with a piece of diaphanous headgear, which makes her look vaguely like Minnie Mouse. When Fairbanks's thief steals into the princess's apartment, he ushers Wong out of his way at knife-point, blind to the fact that she is far more gorgeous than Julanne Johnston's rather vapid sleeping princess.
It's a moot point as to whether Wong really was a fully fledged film star at all. As "love scenes with occidental actors were not permitted on screen", she rarely won leading roles. She was used instead by Hollywood to provide a whiff of exoticism: to play the scarlet woman, who could be killed off in the final reel, or in bit parts simply to embellish a few scenes as a dancer or a dragon lady. It somehow sums up the mix of prurience and prejudice with which she is regarded that, for many, the most interesting fact about her film career is the (unsubstantiated) story that she had an affair with Marlene Dietrich after appearing with her in Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932).
In the late 1920s, frustrated at being made to play too many characters with names like Lotus Blossom, Wong headed to Europe in search of more challenging roles. She later claimed that she had considered abandoning the industry altogether. "When I left Hollywood, I vowed I would never act for the films again," she told one fan magazine in 1933. "I was so tired of the parts that I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain -murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilisation that is so many, many times older than that of the west."
Born Wong Liu Tsong (Frosted Yellow Willows) in Los Angeles in 1905, Wong was the daughter of Sam Wong, a native Californian who had his own laundry business. She was 14 years old when she was spotted by James Wang, a character actor and agent, who noticed her when he was shooting a film in LA's Chinatown and secured her a job as an extra in a film called Red Lantern . She left home at the age of 17, continued to act in bit parts, supplemented her earnings by working as a model, and eventually made her breakthrough in The Toll of the Sea (1922), a variation on Madame Butterfly that was notable as the first Technicolor film. The plot was inspired by an old Chinese proverb that said the sea "claims twice in pain for the joy it bestows". She plays a Chinese woman who saves a white man washed up by the sea. She falls in love with him and they have a child, but he is called back to the US. Abandoned and distraught, separated from her child, she throws herself into the sea. On this grim note ends Wong's first and last leading role in a Hollywood movie.
By embarking on a movie career, Wong risked leaving herself in limbo, accepted neither by the Chinese community nor in Hollywood. As her biographer Hodges puts it, quoting an old Chinese proverb: "The good Chinese family does not want a son to be a soldier because it's so dangerous, or a daughter to be an actress... in this time, actresses were equated at best with courtesans and more often with prostitutes." Her father severely disapproved of her screen ambitions and used to lock her up in her room to stop her going to auditions. Meanwhile, though Paramount gave her a contract in 1931, the studios kept passing her over for leads, even in Oriental dramas. She played second fiddle to Myrna Loy in Warner Bros's The Crimson City in 1927. A decade later, she lost out to Luise Rainer (who won an Oscar) when she lobbied for the role of the Chinese peasant in The Good Earth .
After visiting her relatives in China in the mid-1930s, she was philosophical about being caught between two cultures. "It's a pretty sad situation to be rejected by Chinese because I'm 'too American' and by American producers because they prefer other races to act Chinese parts," she reflected.
Wong had many different incarnations. Though California-born and with an American accent, which grated with reviewers when she appeared on stage, she spoke Cantonese and had studied Chinese art, literature and philosophy. She was also fluent in French and German. Considerably more erudite than the average Paramount contract star, she wrote a series of articles about her experiences in China in the mid-1930s for the New York Herald Tribune. In the early 1930s, when she was working on the stage and screen in London, she was known as "one of the best dressed women in Mayfair" and mixed easily in high society. But she never married. When asked why not, during a trip to London in the mid-1950s, she replied: "I have lived too broad a life to accept the Chinese attitude that treats a wife as a chattel, yet I look too different to marry outside that community." Besides, it was against the anachronistic and racist Californian laws of the time for a Chinese woman to wed a white man.
Elaine Mae Woo, a Los Angeles-based film-maker who is making a documentary about Wong, has spent the past seven years researching the actress's life. "Anna May Wong represents not only a Chinese-American woman trying to make it in film. She represents an entire generation," Woo says. "She wasn't trying to be the dragon lady or to make herself the biggest star ever. She wanted to learn a craft. That's why she went on stage, did radio programmes and television - it was a struggle for her, but she really wanted to be an artist more than anything."
Back in Hollywood as her youth faded, Wong turned into a B-movie actress before retiring from film-making in 1942. Over the next 20 years, she lived quietly in Santa Monica. She worked for the United China Relief Organisation, took the occasional role in TV dramas (for instance, in the short-lived 1951 series called The Gallery of Mme Liu Tsong , as a Charlie Chan-like art expert/sleuth) and oversaw her property; she owned a big house, bought at the height of her fame, which she converted into apartments after her family decided they did not want to live there. She made one or two fleeting screen appearances: as a maid in Impact (1949) and opposite Lana Turner in Portrait in Black (1960), her final film before she died suddenly of a heart attack aged 54 in February 1961.
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in Wong's life and career in the US. Two new biographies were recently published, various documentaries are on the way; there have been retrospectives, and even a new couture collection inspired by her costumes. When the BFI's restored version of Piccadilly was screened at the New York film festival, her performance received rave reviews. Perhaps all this attention is partly motivated by guilt: both for how badly she was treated by the film industry and how quickly she was forgotten. The irony is that prospects for Chinese-American actresses don't seem any brighter today. On a recent Wisconsin radio show, Wong's rival biographers, Hodges and Anthony B Chan, were invited to speculate as to which Chinese-American might play her in a screen version of her life: tellingly, Lucy Liu was the only name they could muster.
Piccadilly, accompanied by Neil Brand's score, is at the Barbican, London EC2, on March 26. Box office: 0845 120 7550.