At 93, veteran actor James Hong finally gets his star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame

James Hong, the ubiquitous veteran character actor who found a champion in Lost star Daniel Dae Kim, accepted his fan-funded star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in a burst of drums, cymbals and Chinese lion dancers – all harbingers of joy and good fortune.

“I’m here! I’m alive!,” the energetic 93-year-old said on Tuesday as he accepted the 2,723rd star on the Walk of Fame, located between Madame Tussauds Wax Museum and the TCL Chinese Theatre. And Hong just made history as the oldest person ever to receive a star on the Walk of Fame.

Noting that he had no speech planned, “because I’m not that kind of person,” Hong said he preferred to enjoy seeing familiar faces and take in the moment as it happened.

Hong, who is Chinese-American, was born in Minnesota and served stateside in the US Army during the Korean war. He joins fellow performers of Asian descent including Anna May Wong, Mako, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu on the Walk of Fame.

In the course of four days in August 2020, Kim raised the not-insubstantial sum needed to pay for Hong’s star, then took on the process of submitting an application. On the GoFundMe page, the Hawaii Five-0 actor wrote that Hong “epitomises the term ‘working actor’, and that’s not even taking into account all he’s done to help further representation for actors of colour”.

(In 1965 Hong was a co-founder of East West Players, the first theatre in the US committed to “raising the visibility of the Asian-American experience”, according to the group’s website. At one point, Kim said, 70 per cent of Asian-American and Pacific Islander actors had ties to the group, now based in Little Tokyo.)