Lin Dai (26 December 1934 – 17 July 1964), born Cheng Yuetyue and known in English as Linda, was a Mandarin-language film star of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong; her stage name was a transliteration of 'Linda'. She was born in Guangxi, her ancestral home Binyang, the daughter of the politician Cheng Siyuan, who later became a vice-chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee. She spent her childhood in Guilin, Chongqing and Nanjing, studied music at the Guangxi Provincial Art College and attended Nanjing's Zhonghua Girls' Middle School, and moved to Hong Kong in 1948, where she took part in stage plays. In 1950 she joined Great Wall Movie Enterprises through the introduction of Yuan Yang'an but was not given leading roles because of her father's political background; in 1952 she moved to Yung Hwa, where her debut film The Emerald Green (1953), adapted from Shen Congwen's novel Border Town, made her name. Over the following eleven years she starred in more than fifty films for Yung Hwa, Cathay, MP & GI and Shaw Brothers, equally at home in modern and period dress, and played a dual role in The Golden Lotus. She won Best Actress at the Asian Film Festival four times: for The Golden Lotus (1957), for Li Han-hsiang's Huangmei opera Diau Charn (1958), and in 1961 for both Les Belles and Love Without End at the 8th and 9th editions, becoming the first person to take the festival's Best Actress award four times, a record still unbroken. In 1959 Li Han-hsiang's The Kingdom and the Beauty, starring Lin Dai and Chao Lei, took in more than HK$406,000 and topped that year's box office across both Chinese and Western films; in 1962 her Madam White Snake again broke Hong Kong's box-office record. Her other films include Red Doll (1958), The Belle of the Clouds (1959) and the colourful costume and musical pictures of the early 1960s. In 1961 she married Lung Shing-fan, a son of the Yunnan warlord Lung Yun, and gave birth to a son in 1963. On 17 July 1964 she died at her home from an overdose of sleeping pills and coal gas at the age of twenty-nine, leaving The Lotus Lamp (1964) and the lower half of The Blue and the Black unfinished; The Blue and the Black was completed and won Best Picture at the 13th Asian Film Festival. Lung Shing-fan never remarried and kept her belongings and furnishings as they had been, according to accounts. In 1995 she was the only Mandarin star in Hong Kong's film-star stamp series, she is now honoured on the Avenue of Stars, and in 2024 the Hong Kong Film Archive held a retrospective of her films.
With her delicate looks and her command of both modern and period roles, Lin Dai became one of the most bankable Chinese-language stars of the 1950s and 1960s. Her four Asian Film Festival Best Actress awards, a record still unbroken, reflect her standing with audiences and studios of the day, and her films across several studios helped drive the vogue for Huangmei opera and musical pictures. Her death at twenty-nine shocked the Hong Kong film world and turned her last films into a talking point among fans for decades.
Achievements
- 1957 · Won Best Actress at the 4th Asian Film Festival for The Golden Lotus (1957).
- 1958 · Won Best Actress at the 5th Asian Film Festival for the Shaw Brothers Huangmei opera film Diau Charn (1958).
- 1961 · Won back-to-back Best Actress awards at the 8th and 9th Asian Film Festivals for Les Belles and Love Without End, her fourth such honour.