Lou Fen, originally named Zeng Gufen, was a native of Xiamen in Fujian, where she grew up, and is recorded as born around 1924. Her interest in the performing arts began in her secondary-school days, when she took part in performances with a theatre troupe; after graduating she became a primary-school teacher, and she had no formal drama training before entering films. She moved to Hong Kong with her family after 1947. Amoy-dialect cinema flourished in the 1950s across Minnan, Taiwan and the Fujianese communities of Southeast Asia, and post-war Hong Kong gathered filmmakers from Minnan and Chaoshan, allowing such films to be financed and shot there; Lou Fen and her sister Lou Hung were among the performers active then. Her younger sister, Lou Hung, starred as the lead in Amoy-dialect films such as A Belated Encounter (1948) and The Air is Cleared (1948); when Lou Hung moved into Mandarin pictures, Lou Fen entered the same cinema, appearing in The Story of Chen San and Fifth Madam (1952), the two-part Chen Jinggu (1952–53) and Love Deep as the Sea (1954). By 1955, thanks to the popularity of her cross-dressing turn as the Emperor Chengzong in Meng Lijun, she was cast as male characters in various films, among them The Butterfly Lovers (1955) and Tiger Wang Snatches His Bride (1956), and in All Mixed Up (1956) she even portrayed two different characters at once. In her string of cross-dressing roles she played opposite her sister Hung in Dream of the Red Mansion (1956) and its sequel (1956). She went on to appear in Fairy and Man (1957), Yang Naiwu and Little Cabbage (1959) and a 1964 film. Lou starred in close to thirty Amoy-dialect films, most of them directed by But Fu, a leading director of the genre; cross-dressing was not uncommon in Amoy-dialect cinema, and her dashing image made her one of its representatives. She married twice — her first husband a musician — and later married the director But Fu as her second husband, with whom she emigrated to the United States and gradually retired from the screen.
Lou Fen was a representative cross-dressing performer of the Amoy-dialect cinema; the success of Meng Lijun in 1955 opened a run of male roles for her and added a 'woman playing man' line to Amoy-dialect films, while her appearances with her sister Lou Hung traced that cinema's passage from heyday to decline in the 1950s.
Achievements
- 1952 · Appeared in the Amoy-dialect film Chen San and Fifth Madam
- 1955 · Won popularity playing the emperor in Meng Lijun
- 1956 · Co-starred with her sister Lou Hung in two 1956 films
- 1959 · Appeared in Yang Naiwu and Little Cabbage, taking leading or supporting roles in close to thirty Amoy-dialect films.