That silent screen goddess Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935) is better known to today's film buffs than to their counterparts a half-century ago is attributable to two relatively modern phenomena: Maggie Cheung Man-yuk and the internet.
Ruan, the centennial of whose birth is being commemorated by a retrospective at the Hong Kong Film Archive, was at the pinnacle of Shanghai celebrity when her life ended in suicide shortly before her 25th birthday. The ensuing decades saw her name sink into obscurity as talkies relegated silent pictures to the dustbin of history, a situation compounded by the spotty nature of movie preservation and the post-1949 Chinese government's antipathy to star worship.
Although prints of many Ruan features resided in Beijing's Film Archives, for years they went unseen by all but a few scholars. If the actress was mentioned in the press, it was less to discuss her virtuosity than to treat her as a symbolic victim of the pre-communist era's scandal-mongering tabloids and the lowly status of women, even luminaries, when confronted with masculine betrayal.
Lost in the shuffle was a palpable reminder of Ruan's effervescent charm and subtle mastery of a mute thespian art form that by 1930 had been abandoned by Hollywood in favour of recorded dialogue, but in China continued to flourish throughout the early 1930s. Though the Chinese screen began to talk in 1930-31, silent pictures (some accompanied by a soundtrack with music and effects) were produced till mid-decade, with Ruan acclaimed by contemporary critics and audiences alike as one of the medium's most brilliant practitioners.
Those years coincided with her contract at United Photoplay Service (UPS, known in Chinese as Lianhua), a studio with a rare commitment to films combining commercial viability and social relevance. It was there that Ruan's artistry reached its peak in an array of roles, from European-tinged costume comedies such as A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931) - based on William Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona - to the grim realism of The Goddess (1934), in which her portrayal of a prostitute struggling to raise an infant son represented a high-water mark in the waning years of Chinese silents.
It is these UPS productions that are the foundation of Ruan's recently achieved stature as a major talent - in Asian cinema and on the world's silent stage.