Pai Lan, originally named Fu Jinman, was born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1938. In 1956 she was admitted to Taiwan's Zhonghua Film Company and adopted the stage name Pai Lan. In 1957 the studio lent her to the Yazhou (Asia) Film Company for the Taiwanese-dialect film Zhu Hongwu, where she also received acting training; the film turned out to be a breakthrough and made her a star. Through introductions from Hsia Wei-tang, managing director of International Film Co Ltd, she came to Hong Kong in 1959 to appear in Amoy-dialect productions by the Golden City Film Company such as The Jealous Woman, The Happy Pair, My Beloved Husband and Love Between Sisters-in-Law (all 1959) and The Evil of Money (1961), most of them directed by But Fu. After a contractual dispute she returned to Taiwan and continued making Taiwanese-dialect films, and industry that boomed in 1950s-70s Taiwan, producing films in the thousands, mostly low-cost, fast-turnaround pictures that were then the island's most popular home-grown cinema. In 1965 she won both the Golden Tripod Award for best actress and the Formosa Award at the Taiwanese-dialect film festival for Since Your Departure, a rare double honour that also saw her top a poll of the year's ten leading actresses. She went on to appear in Japanese director Fukasaku Kinji's The Secret of the Diamond (1966) and in the same year formed her own Xinghua Film Company, with which she produced and starred in Kai Zhang Da Ji (1966). From 1968 she partnered with Central Motion Pictures on Mandarin films such as Morning Song (1968) and Jade Goddess (1969), moving into Mandarin cinema as the Taiwanese-dialect market shrank in the late 1960s. She married in 1970 and retired from the screen. Amoy-dialect films, shot in the Amoy language and aimed largely at Southeast Asian Chinese audiences, and Taiwanese-dialect films were the two main branches of Minnan-language cinema, intersecting across Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and Pai was one of the few actresses to move between the two markets.
Pai Lan came from Taiwan to star in a string of Amoy-dialect films in Hong Kong, making her a key face of that cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s; winning both the Golden Tripod Award and the Formosa Award for Since Your Departure in 1965 made her a rare double winner, and she later ran her own production company as producer as well as star.
Achievements
- 1957 · Appeared in her first Taiwanese-dialect film, Zhu Hongwu, which made her a star.
- 1965 · Won both the Golden Tripod Award for best actress and the Formosa Award for Since Your Departure.
- 1966 · Formed her own Xinghua Film Company and produced and starred in Kai Zhang Da Ji.