Linda Lin Dai 林黛
Linda Lin Dai, known in Hong Kong as Lin Dai, was one of the top stars of Mandarin-language cinema in the years when MP&GI and Shaw Brothers vied for audiences. She worked for both. In Diau Charn she played a beauty forced to play nice with the man on whom her life depended. In Les Belles she danced the mambo and the cancan as effortlessly as her character quarreled with the troupe's manager. For both roles Lin Dai won Asian Film Festival awards. In all she took the festival's Best Actress prize four times, and her screen career lasted barely more than a decade.
According to the Hong Kong Film Archive, Cheng Yueh-ju, the future Linda Lin Dai, was born on December 26, 1934, in Binyang County, Guangxi. HKCinema gives December 27 of the same year, and some biographies name Nanning as her birthplace. She was the eldest daughter of Jiang Xiuhua and Cheng Siyuan, a political figure and secretary to Li Zongren, who later served as acting president of the Republic of China. As a child, Yueh-ju lived in Guilin, Chongqing and Nanjing, and studied in the music department of the Guangxi Provincial Art School. According to the film archive, she moved to Hong Kong in 1948. Some biographies date her move with her mother to 1949.
She got into films thanks to a portrait displayed in a photo studio window. In 1950 the picture caught the eye of producer Yuen Yeung-On, who invited the girl to the Great Wall studio. Her English name Linda became the basis for the Chinese stage name Lin Dai. At Great Wall she never landed a notable role. As the Hong Kong Film Archive writes, at the left-leaning studio she was held back by her father's ties to the Kuomintang. In 1952 she moved to Yong Hwa, and the very next year saw the release of Singing Under the Moon (1953), directed by Yan Jun, an adaptation of Shen Cong-Wen's novella Border Town. Lin Dai played Cuicui, the granddaughter of an old ferryman. She was remembered at once, and for several years she was readily cast as village girls. In Fisherman's Delight (1956), Yan Jun was already her partner on screen. She played a fisherman's daughter, he an artist whom she saves from drowning.
Her first Asian Film Festival award came with Golden Lotus (1957), one of MP&GI's earliest pictures. Lin Dai has two roles there — a lively storyteller performing in a teahouse and a quiet young lady from a wealthy family. Both love the same man, and each in her own way is ready to sacrifice her happiness for him. That same year, with the same director, Griffin Yueh, she played a spoiled beauty in The Battle of Love (1957), scripted by the writer Zhang Ailing. The girl makes her suitors jealous in order to attract the attention of the one man she truly likes. However much trouble she causes those around her, in Lin Dai's performance she remains charming. In urban comedies, Hong Kong's female viewers also studied her outfits. Lin Dai became one of the actresses by whom fashion was judged.
At Shaw & Sons her first big success was Diau Charn (1958) by Li Han-Hsiang. Her character sets out to turn the warlord Dong Zhuo against his adopted son Lü Bu. To do so, she must convince each of them of her affection. With one, Lin Dai is courteous and coquettish, while at the other she takes offense so convincingly that it is hard to regard it as feigned. This role brought her a second festival award. With the same director she played a tavern girl who falls in love with an emperor in disguise in The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959). The emperor was played by Chao Lei, her co-star in Diau Charn, and the film itself won the prize for best picture at the next Asian Film Festival. These two pictures popularized films in the huangmei style, in which characters sang both at decisive moments and in the middle of an ordinary conversation. In both films, Jing Ting sang for Lin Dai.
In 1958, Lin Dai briefly interrupted her film career to study at Columbia University. In New York she began a romance with Lung Sheng-Hsun, son of Lung Yun, the former governor of Yunnan Province. By one account they met in New York; by another, they had already known each other back in Nanjing. On February 12, 1961, they married in Hong Kong. Surviving color footage shows Lin Dai at home preparing for the ceremony and then traveling to the church. Two years later their only son, Lung Tsung-Han, was born. In an old interview recounted by the Singaporean newspaper Shin Min Daily News in 2025, Lin Dai said that she and her husband worked a great deal and saw each other whenever time allowed, and that she was very close to her son. She said she kept acting because she enjoyed it and the public still wanted to see her.
In the year of her wedding, two films by Doe Ching were released. Les Belles (1961) became Shaw Brothers' first color film in the widescreen Shawscope format. Lin Dai plays the lead singer of a musical troupe and within a single film manages to dance the cancan, the mambo and a traditional Chinese drum dance. In the black-and-white Love Without End (1961) she also takes the stage — her Li Qingqing sings in a nightclub — but her strongest scenes are with Guan Shan, when Li Qingqing cannot bring herself to tell his character the truth. The title song was sung off-screen by Carrie Ku. Lin Dai was honored at the Asian Film Festival in 1961 for her role in the musical, and in 1962 for Love Without End — her fourth award.
The success of Les Belles allowed Doe Ching to assemble the same team for Love Parade (1963). Lin Dai played a doctor whose relationship with a fashion designer is going badly. The film features fashion shows, and Lin Dai designed twenty-six outfits for her character herself. In parallel, she continued to appear in costume pictures. In Madame White Snake (1962) she played the white snake spirit who takes human form. The special effects were made in Japan, and in Hong Kong the film broke box-office records. Two more costume pictures with Lin Dai were released in 1964. In The Last Woman of Shang (1964) she played Da Ji, whom legend blames for the fall of the dynasty, and in Beyond the Great Wall (1964) she played Wang Zhaojun, who agreed to marry for the sake of peace on the border.
On July 17, 1964, Lin Dai took her own life in Hong Kong. She was twenty-nine years old. As the South China Morning Post reported the following day, her husband broke down the bedroom door and found her unconscious. She was pronounced dead at the hospital. According to her husband, in the letter she left behind she asked him to take care of their son. Later, in the inscription on his wife's grave, he linked what had happened to a family quarrel and blamed himself for his inattentiveness. What exactly happened between the couple has never become known. Thousands of people came to pay their last respects. Shaw Brothers included footage of the farewell and of the wedding in a memorial film.
After Lin Dai's death, two unfinished pictures remained at the studio. In The Lotus Lamp (1965) she played both a goddess and her son. The second picture, a melodrama about the war with Japan, was released in two parts — The Blue and the Black and The Blue and the Black (Part 2) (1966). In it she again appeared with Guan Shan, this time as the orphan Tang Qi. In both pictures, in the scenes she did not have time to film, Lin Dai was replaced by the actress who resembled her, Elsie Tu (Du De). In 1966 the Asian Film Festival awarded The Blue and the Black the prize for best film, and Lin Dai a posthumous award for her contribution to cinema. The last of her films to be released was The Mirror (1967).
In 1995, Hongkong Post issued a series of stamps featuring movie stars. Linda Lin Dai was the only representative of Mandarin-language Hong Kong cinema in the set. Lung Sheng-Hsun lived in their flat until his death in 2007. When their son invited staff from the Hong Kong Film Archive there, Lin Dai's dressing table with her cosmetics was still in the bedroom, and her cheongsams lay in trunks. The son handed part of the belongings over to the archive. In 2009, her dresses, scripts and awards were put on display there, and eighteen of her films were screened. For her ninetieth birthday, the film archive once again held a retrospective and digitised Meng Lisi, Maid of the Jungle (1961) — a rare martial arts film for Lin Dai that had previously been seen in very few places.
