Ouyang Sha-Fei 歐陽莎菲
In postwar Shanghai, Ouyang Sha-Fei was known for playing women who could put on airs and wrap anyone around their little finger. In Hong Kong she began playing mothers and grandmothers before she had even turned forty. In The Love Eterne, Sha-Fei mourns her son, while in Too Late for Love she drives her daughter-in-law out of the house. For the latter role she won a Golden Horse. At Shaw Brothers she appeared in both costume melodramas and action films, and audiences of the next generation grew used to seeing her in Hong Kong TV series.
According to her Shaw Brothers colleague Chua Lam, Qian Shunying, the future Ouyang Sha-Fei, was born on September 9, 1924, in Wuxian County, Jiangsu Province, in what is now Suzhou. Taiwan's National Library of Cultural Memory gives 1923, while the Chinese Sogou encyclopedia lists October 18, 1923. An essay published on Sohu in 2022 offers yet another date: May 9, 1924. It also states that after her father's early death, Shunying and her two elder brothers were raised by their mother. According to Chua Lam, by the age of fourteen Shunying was already working as a salesgirl at the Shanghai department store Whiteaway, Laidlaw & Co.
In 1940 she enrolled in acting courses at the Shanghai studio Golden Star and, as Chua Lam recalled, was the youngest in the group. A year later she appeared in her first melodrama, Waves of Spring Water (春水情波), which reached the screen in 1942. In wartime Shanghai she quickly moved from bit parts to prominent roles. One of them Sha-Fei played for Tu Kuang-Chi in Swallows Welcome Spring (1943). In the Shanghai Dream of the Red Mansions (1944) she played Xiren, the maid of the young master of the house. Sha-Fei continued to appear in Tu Kuang-Chi's films after the war. In the 1940s they married and had three daughters.
Sha-Fei became famous through Tu Kuang-Chi's Agent No. 1 (天字第一號, 1946). The director adapted the play Wild Rose for the screen, and Sha-Fei played a society beauty, the wife of a prominent collaborator in occupied Beijing. Her character pretends to care for nothing but dresses and suitors while secretly gathering intelligence for Chinese agents. The film was a great success in Shanghai and sparked a vogue for wartime spy stories. In 1964 Taiwan produced a remake of the same name, followed by four sequels.
Shortly before leaving Shanghai, Sha-Fei appeared for Tu Kuang-Chi in Female Prisoner No. 13 (1949), released by his own film company. That same year the actress moved to Hong Kong, where the two soon began working together again. Thus came Modern Wives (1951), in which Sha-Fei played a woman far removed from the era's idea of the model spouse. In Modern Red Chamber Dream (1952) she returned to Cao Xueqin's novel, this time as Xue Baochai. The Great Wall studio moved the action to the 1950s and promoted the picture almost as a fashion show. The booklet even listed the number of women's outfits—216—and in one episode Sha-Fei and Li Li-Hua, who played Lin Daiyu, appeared in swimsuits—a rarity for both actresses.
In the 1950s her marriage to Tu Kuang-Chi fell apart. According to the Hong Kong Film Archive, the couple's relationship had already soured when they worked together on A Woman's Love in 1953. The film journalist Shen Weibai wrote about Sha-Fei's affair with the married director Hung Suk-Wan. He was later quoted by Suzy, a writer from Taiwan. According to rumors circulating at the time, they grew close during the shooting of Don't Tell My Husband (1952). Sha-Fei continued to appear in Hung's films after that picture as well, notably in the drama The Illegitimate Son (1953). By Chua Lam's account, she herself believed that Tu Kuang-Chi was the first to give cause for the breakup.
In the second half of the 1950s, Sha-Fei increasingly played women noticeably older than herself. In The Flame of Love (1956), Li Li-Hua, almost the same age as Sha-Fei, played a girl taken in by her aunt after her mother's death. The aunt was played by Sha-Fei. In Devotion (1960), she plays a servant whose daughter falls in love with the master's son. After her daughter's death, she raises her granddaughter and, whenever wealthy suitors are mentioned, recalls how that story ended. Sha-Fei was about thirty-five when she played the grandmother of a grown woman and won Best Supporting Actress at the seventh Asian Film Festival for the role.
In 1963, Sha-Fei joined the Shaw Brothers studio. One of her first assignments there was The Love Eterne (1963), a musical version of the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. Sha-Fei was cast as Shanbo's mother, while the young man was played by actress Ivy Ling Po. The film was such a hit in Taiwan that when Ivy Ling Po arrived for the Golden Horse Awards, thousands of fans greeted her at the airport. Four years later, the two actresses met again in Too Late for Love (1967), this time as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. As soon as the son leaves for the front, Sha-Fei's character sets about driving his young wife out of the house. At the 1968 Golden Horse ceremony, Ivy Ling Po won for Best Actress and Sha-Fei for Best Supporting Actress.
Chua Lam recalled that at the studio Sha-Fei kept a low profile and said little. With him she spoke in her native Wu dialect, softly and unhurriedly. In A Place to Call Home (1970), she played a woman who raised an adopted daughter; in Apartment for Ladies (1970), a stubborn landlady; and in The Fourteen Amazons (1972), Princess Chai, one of the women of the Yang family who go off to war. In 1977, in Shaw Brothers' The Dream of the Red Chamber, Sha-Fei returned to the Jia family, this time as Lady Wang, Baoyu's mother. In the action film Dragon Fist (1979), she was cast as the widow of the mentor of Jackie Chan's character. The hero takes it upon himself to protect the widow and her daughter. When the widow is poisoned, he is forced to serve the man who promised her the antidote.
In 1979, Sha-Fei and Tu Kuang-Chi, according to Chua Lam, married again. The wedding was held in the US, where Tu had been living for several years by then. In May 1980, he died in Los Angeles.
In the early 1980s, Sha-Fei worked in Taiwanese television and continued to appear in films. She appeared in the anthology film In Out Time (1982), from which the Taiwanese New Wave is usually dated. Three years later, in the Hong Kong drama Why Me?, she played the grandmother of Coco, a social worker trying to help a young man with an intellectual disability. Coco's parents separated when she was a child. Her father never learned to take care of himself and now comes to her mother for money.
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Sha-Fei increasingly worked for TVB. In The Justice Of Life (1989), she played a deaf old woman; in Blood of Good and Evil (1990), Aunt Rui. In films, her roles were now very small. In Gambling Ghost (1991), where Sammo Hung Kam-Bo played members of three generations of one family, Sha-Fei flashed by at a mahjong table. In 1993, at the thirtieth Golden Horse ceremony, she received a commemorative award along with other film veterans. One of her last roles was the grandmother in the supernatural series Shade of Darkness (1994).
Ouyang Sha-Fei spent her final years in the United States, where her eldest daughter cared for her. In his published memoirs, Chua Lam states that she died on 3 August 2010 in Salt Lake City. A Taiwanese obituary dated 6 August, whose authors spoke with her middle daughter, gives Los Angeles as the place of death. English-language references also cite another date – 5 August. Her daughter recalled that on the day she died, her mother called her and said how much she missed her. A few hours later, Sha-Fei died in her sleep. She was buried in California next to Tu Kuang-Chi.
