1940s: acting career '' In 1941, Huang followed her brother Zongjiang to
Shanghai where she became a stage actress in
Huang Zuolin's theatre company. She debuted in
Cao Yu's play
Metamorphosis and rose to fame in the comedy
Sweet Child. In 1947, she made her screen debut in
Shen Fu's film
Pursuit before starring in her breakthrough film
Rhapsody of Happiness, by the famous director
Chen Liting and writer
Chen Baichen. In the film she portrayed the heroine, a woman forced into prostitution and drug dealing in war-torn China. Her performance was said to be "of unprecedented artistic quality, capturing with authenticity, naturalness, and control" both the degeneracy and kindness of the character's complex nature. The male lead was her future husband
Zhao Dan, China's most celebrated male actor of the time. Soon after their marriage in 1948, Huang and Zhao both joined the
Kunlun Film Studio, run by the underground
Chinese Communist Party. In less than two years, she acted in several acclaimed films including
Women Side by Side and
Crows and Sparrows, portraying a diverse range of roles including a revolutionary, a teacher, a prostitute, and a mistress of a government official. Huang and her husband were at the forefront of an era that has been recognized as the
Second Golden Age of Chinese cinema.
Early People's Republic of China: acting and writing ''. From left: Huang Zongying, Sha Li, and
Shangguan Yunzhu After the
founding of the
People's Republic of China in 1949, Huang switched to writing as her main career, which was also her childhood passion. She published her first prose collection,
Onward Moves the Peace Train, in 1951, followed by two more collections,
Stories of Love and
A Girl. She did not play a major role after the 1953 film
Bless the Children. Under
Mao Zedong's directive that "the arts must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers", Chinese films became dominated by stereotypical proletarian "heroes" with few roles suitable for her. Beginning in 1954 she wrote the film scripts for
An Everyday Occupation (1955) and
The First Spring of the 60s.
Cultural Revolution During the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Mao's wife
Jiang Qing, who had been an actress in the 1930s, launched a campaign to persecute former Shanghai colleagues who were familiar with her past. Many of Huang and Zhao's friends in the film and drama industry were driven to death, including
Zheng Junli,
Cai Chusheng, and
Wang Ying. Zhao Dan, among the first to be targeted, was imprisoned for five years, during which Huang had no idea whether he was still alive. She remained free, but was frequently targeted by the
Red Guards for physical abuse. Her family, with more than ten people, lived in one small room and had to survive on only 30 yuan a month. Her own children denounced her and Zhao Dan as "counterrevolutionaries".
Post-Cultural Revolution: reportage writing After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Zhao Dan was politically rehabilitated and returned home. Huang resumed her writing and was elected to the executive committee of the
China Writers Association. She focused on the
reportage genre, which she had begun writing in 1963 before being interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Instead of the famous and the successful, she chose her subjects mainly among the common people, especially intellectuals who quietly struggled for their ideals but were belittled and denounced by society. In 1977, she published her work
Heart in the journal ''
People's Literature'' commemorating her colleague and friend
Shangguan Yunzhu, who had been persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution. Shangguan's son Wei Ran credited the work with expediting her posthumous political rehabilitation. Huang often applied scriptwriting techniques, such as switches and flashbacks, to her reportage, and enriched her writing with poetic lyricism. She won the National Award for Outstanding Reportage Literature three times, for her works "The Flight of the Wild-Geese", "Mandarin Oranges", and "The Wooden Cabin". Her story "The Flight of the Wild-Geese" (大雁情) has been translated into English by Yu Fanqin and Wang Mingjie. In a 2002 article, Huang revealed a conversation she had overheard between
Mao Zedong and his biographer Luo Jinan, in which Mao told Luo that if
Lu Xun, the leading
Chinese writer of the 1930s, had still been alive in the 1950s, he would have had to toe the official line or be held in prison. ==Filmography==