Tina Chin Fei 金霏
Tina Chin Fei trained in the Shaw Brothers school and broke into film at a time when the studio was turning out musicals, spy pictures and historical actioners all at once. She appeared in all three genres, and in The Fourteen Amazons she played one of the women of the Yang family. After a long absence from the screen, Chin returned to Hong Kong television: Lydia Shum Tin-Ha paid her a visit in Seattle.
Tina Chin Fei came to the movies through the Shaw Brothers school. The Hong Kong Film Archive lists her among the trainees of the experimental Nanguo troupe, in which the studio trained actors. Newcomers were assigned to language groups, taught to speak before the camera, to sing, dance and move, and on set they were shown how filming was done. A beginning actor was expected to be able to move from a musical into a detective story or a costume picture whenever the studio schedule demanded it. Chin's early roles show just how varied that work could be. Far less is known about where she grew up and what she did before the school. Even the place and year of her birth differ in later biographical references.
In Pink Tears and Hong Kong Nocturne, Chin appeared in the mid-1960s, when Shaw Brothers was still often releasing contemporary urban melodramas. Nocturne told of three sisters who grew up in an entertainer's family and themselves take to the stage. A few years earlier the studio had trained young performers precisely for such pictures — people who could both deliver a musical number and play a dialogue scene. Spy films followed for Chin, in which characters hid under false names and carried out secret missions. Among them was Operation Lipstick (1967). Nocturne and Operation were both directed by the Japanese filmmaker Inoue Umetsugu. In Operation, the spy chase after a microfilm is interspersed with jokes and musical numbers, and the heroine played by Cheng Pei-Pei sings and dances in a cabaret. Chin also appeared in Inter-Pol and in Kiss and Kill. The vogue for spy pictures brought her several roles for which the newspapers later compared her to the actresses of the Bond films.
In Temptress of a Thousand Faces (1969), Chin plays a woman trying to track down a thief who can change her appearance. The thief takes on her likeness, and at a certain point it is Chin's own heroine who is being pursued. This crime story has everything that made audiences love Hong Kong's spy fantasies, from masks and secret rooms to fights in which the heroines themselves take part. The film was directed by the South Korean filmmaker Jeng Cheong-Woh (Jeong Chang-hwa), who later made King Boxer for Shaw Brothers. The picture travelled to overseas festivals after Chin had already stepped away from the movies. At festivals in Busan and San Francisco it was shown as an example of a vivid Hong Kong action film in contemporary settings.
By the early 1970s audiences already knew Chin well. In The Fourteen Amazons (1972) she played the seventh of the women of the Yang family. The family is headed in this film by Lisa Lu's character, and what helps tell the amazons apart is that each has her own age, her own place in the family and her own way of carrying herself in the ranks. Here Chin had a different task than in the spy films. She was playing in an ensemble, and the audience followed how the women act together after the men of the family have died. The picture won several awards in Taiwan. That same year saw the release of Chang Cheh's Four Riders, with Chin in the cast. The director moved his fighters to Seoul, where, right after the Korean War, they run into drug dealers. Chin played Yin Hua. The film again has plenty of fighting, but the characters wear contemporary clothes, and at the centre of the story are now several people who have met by chance in a foreign city. The following year, readers of the Hong Kong newspaper the Overseas Chinese Evening News placed Chin among the top ten stars. Over those years audiences had seen her in the most varied pictures.
In 1974 David Chiang, best known as an actor, cast Chin in his A Mad World of Fools. The film was made up of separate comic stories. In one of them a husband is so absorbed in the television that he barely notices his wife beside him. After several years of studio detective films and big costume pictures, Chin was once again playing in modern dress, in the setting of an ordinary apartment. It is harder to trace her work beyond that. She appeared regularly until the second half of the 1970s. The catalogues also list later entries, among them My Sentimental Little Friend (1984) and Just Heroes (1989). From these records it is difficult to establish when and under what circumstances she finally stopped acting. Chin herself said almost nothing publicly about her retirement.
After a long absence from the screen, Chin appeared on a TVB programme in which Lydia Shum visited old acquaintances from Hong Kong cinema. In November 2006 the show aired her meeting with Chin and director Sun Chung in Seattle. Chin and Sun had known each other since their youth and were living together by the time the crew arrived. The journalist Lau Nai-Chai (Liu Naiji), who later recounted this episode, recalled a house by the water where they invited old friends. Little is known about how Tina Chin's life unfolded in the years that followed.
