Wang De-Shun 王德顺
In March 2015, Wang De-Shun opened the Beijing Fashion Week show with his old mime act, and at the end walked the runway in quilted trousers and bare-chested. Footage of that appearance spread across the internet, and the grey-haired actor, familiar to audiences from The Forbidden Kingdom and Miss Granny, came to be called "China's most handsome grandpa." By then Wang had spent years training for a performance he had dreamed up together with his wife. On stage he performed alongside replicas of Rodin's works, striving to make the audience mistake him, if only for a second, for a bronze statue.
Wang De-Shun was born on August 20, 1936, in Shenyang. His father worked as a cook, there were nine children in the family, and there was often not enough food to go around. Wang recalled picking leaves and samaras from elm trees so that at home they could be mixed with cornmeal and steamed. He left school early and by the age of fourteen was already selling tram tickets. Then he worked for several years as an electrician, and after his shift he would go to the Shenyang Palace of Culture for Workers. There one could study singing, dancing, recitation, and acting for free. He performed in the factory's amateur troupe, and when he was entrusted with the lead role in a radio play, he decided to go to the theater himself and ask for an audition.
In 1960 Wang joined the drama troupe of the Shenyang Military Region. He was older than many of his fellow troupe members and, by his own account, in stage movement classes he suffered most with stretching. In 1970 Wang and his wife, actress Zhao Aijuan, were demobilized and moved to Changchun. Finding work at the local theater right away did not pan out, and Wang went back to the factory. He returned to the stage in 1974, when the city's song and dance troupe was looking for a performer for the role of fleet commander in the play The Second Spring. At the Changchun Drama Theater he was often cast as superiors afterward as well. Around the same time he played one of his first film roles – Tian Yu in Jin Guang Da Dao (1975).
A chance side job led him to mime. In 1979, when Wang took his daughter to audition for the Shenyang Conservatory, they ran out of money for the trip home. He hired himself out as a model at an art institute, and one of the students asked him to show how a man who misses home after a workday might stand at a door. Wang acted out this scene without words. Later in Changchun he organized a mime circle at a school for the deaf. In 1981 Zhao Aijuan saw a performance by an Austrian mime in Beijing, where she was then studying directing. On her return she told her husband in detail how the show was put together. They set about composing their own numbers. In one of the main ones, "Life," Wang lived an entire life on stage in a few minutes, from a baby's first movements to an old man's gait.
In 1985 he began traveling to Beijing with his mime pieces. The Changchun theater demanded that he return, and in the end Wang gave up his staff position. In the capital they performed as a whole family. Zhao helped compose and stage the mime pieces and arranged performances, their son announced the numbers, and their daughter Wang Qiu accompanied on piano. Housing was often tight. Wang told The Paper how in April 1986 he and his wife spent the night in an underground passage near Wangfujing, and the next day performed before staff of the Ministry of Culture and the German embassy. As he recalled, after that showing he was invited to an international mime festival in Cologne. In another interview Wang said he received the invitation after a performance in 1985. He went to the festival with his daughter in 1987. In those same years Wang taught future fashion models, showing them how to carry themselves and move on the runway.
With age it became harder to perform mime for an entire evening – the strain was like that of a solo dance show. In 1993 Wang visited a Rodin exhibition in Beijing and brought home an album of his works. Zhao suggested taking the female figures from the album as partners. Wang appeared next to a copy of a statue and changed his pose as if responding to its gesture. Three such stories grew into a show that they called "living sculpture." Wang covered his body with bronze-colored makeup and trained a great deal. Even lowering himself to his knees had to be so slow and smooth that the audience would not notice the effort. People's Daily in January 1994 wrote about this work as a new stage experience. A former student of Wang's told The Paper that in the mid-1990s newspapers argued over whether a performance by an almost naked man could be considered art. Wang himself recalled how difficult it was to obtain permission for a public showing. In 1997, according to him, one Beijing university canceled an already agreed-upon performance after his lecture, and the students demanded an explanation from the administration.
Wang only began acting regularly after turning sixty. In an interview with Sohu, he recalled that offers increased after the series Jin Can Si Yu (2002). He played an old man in Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003), and one of his first leading film roles came in the family drama The Park (2007). His character, a retiree from the provinces, comes to visit his grown daughter and sets about finding her a husband. She, in turn, sets about finding him a wife, and the two manage to drive each other up the wall with their attentions. For this work Wang was nominated for Best Actor at the Beijing Student Film Festival. In The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) he played the Jade Emperor, and in Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) he was cast as the blind Xia Ziling.
In Miss Granny (2015) he played Li Dahai, a former manager who has been in love with the lady of the house for many years and recognizes her even after she miraculously grows young again. At the Shanghai International Film Festival, Wang was nominated for the CCTV-6 Film Media Award for Best Supporting Actor for this work. In March of that same year Wang found himself at Fashion Week. His daughter was selecting the music for Hu Sheguang's show, and the designer, seeing a photo of her father on her phone, wanted to invite him. Among the organizers was also a former student of Wang's. The collection was based on the brightly patterned padded jackets and trousers worn in northeastern China. At the start of the show Wang performed his mime piece about old age, and in the finale, at the designer's suggestion, he walked out without a shirt. After the show he began getting calls for commercials. Wang recounted that among other things he was offered a longevity remedy to advertise. He turned that offer down.
On screen he continued to be cast as very different old men. In The Song of Cotton (2016) he played Mr. Sheng, who is losing his memory and mistakes the hired caregiver for his late wife. The film that came closest to what Wang had done in the theater turned out to be Seven Days. It was shown at the Montreal Film Festival in 2015 and released in Chinese cinemas in 2016. The black-and-white picture about an old man living in the snow-covered mountains has not a single line of dialogue, and for almost the entire film Wang is alone in the frame. It was shot in the Changbai Mountains. Already on the first day, during the ascent, Wang had heart trouble, but he took his medicine and carried on filming. On television he was eagerly cast as mentors. In the series Heavenly Sword Dragon Slaying Sabre (2019) he played the Taoist master Zhang Sanfeng.
In 2021 Wang enrolled in a flight school in Beijing's Miyun District. He had long wanted to learn to fly a plane. Before he was allowed to start classes, he had to pass a medical examination as well as tests of balance and memory. On August 20, his 85th birthday, he received his private pilot's license. In 2024 Wang played an old military pilot in the series Eagles Over the Sea (海天雄鹰).
In 2025 Wang's voice was heard in an animated film once again. In Big Fish & Begonia (2016) he voiced the heroine's grandfather, and in Ne Zha 2 he was cast as Wuliang Xianweng, a venerable immortal with a deceptively kindly face. Wang told China Newsweek that during the recording he knew almost nothing about the plot. The voice director Chen Hao prompted him on what intonation to use for each line, and sometimes said the line himself so that Wang could repeat it. The main work was done over two days in Beijing. Later the team tracked Wang down in Hainan and asked him to record a few more shouts. What they were for he only understood in the cinema, when he saw what his immortal gets in the post-credits scene.
In October 2026 Wang came with the team of Eagles Over the Sea to the Feitian television awards ceremony in Yantai. In those days he told the Shenyang Daily that after another medical examination he was no longer allowed at the controls. In Shanghai he would like to mount a large exhibition of his "living sculptures" and eventually open a museum devoted to that work.
