The then Ms. Zhou Xiaohong joined the Mingyue singing troupe in when she was around 12 or 13 years of age where she adopted the stage name "Zhou Xuan" Xuan meaning "beautiful jade" in Chinese. She started singing on radio and at 14 was selected as the second most popular female singer in China.
She soon earned the nickname as "The Golden Voice". In , she starred in the movie Street Angel Street Angel which would bring her to fame. She then began to earn a reputation both as an actress and a singer.
And went on to make a total of 43 movies in her lifetime. Reportedly, by her own confession, despite the many movies she acted in, she was unhappy with most of them. Her favorite remained her role in the "Angel". Her love life however was disappointing.
However, she continued making stage, radio and film appearances during this time, in a total of 16 films between - One an innocent country girl, the other a spoiled party-going girl. From here on, her popularity increased and soon went beyond China and to South East Asia. When she became pregnant and thought of marriage, she began to realize that Zhu was insincere and announced their separation in the press.
If there was no one playing the piano, she would sit down and practice. And the young woman fell in love with this man who paid her so much attention and cared for her. She was then aged 15 and he was nine years older. In the spring of , year-old Zhou Xuan had been the runner-up in a talent contest in Shanghai, just 27 votes behind the winner, the veteran performer Bai Hong. She became know as "Golden Voice" and her fame spread across the city. Zhou Xuan's success attracted interest from film producers.
In May , Zhou Xuan was seen in her first film Children of Troubled Times although she was just a dancer in the chorus then. Over the next year, Zhou Xuan appeared in five films, becoming one of the most popular stars for the Yihua Film Studio in Shanghai.
The turning point The turning point for her film career came in the spring of when the Shanghai Mingxing Film Company decided to film Street Angel with Zhou Xuan playing the singer heroine Xiaohong.
The director was Yuan Muzhi who had established his reputation in the theater. As a child in Ningbo, Yuan had invented stories and performed them before family and friends, playing all the characters himself. His early films Plunder of Peach and Plum, in which he also appeared as a star, and Scenes of City Life China's first musical comedy established his reputation as a major director, screenwriter and actor.
Then came Street Angel in A leading Italian film critic who saw the film first in the s described the work as a miracle. We could imagine how huge the influence this work had exerted in the world film industry back then. He said that when Yuan was explaining the plot, Zhou would be sitting in a corner, listening intently, her eyes wide-open and blinking.
She was like a 5-year-old girl in a lane listening to a story told by an adult, he wrote. On another occasion when the electricians were setting up the lighting for a scene, Zhao recalled that he found two children playing marbles at the back of the set. They were concentrating completely on the game. She had the ability to be relaxed completely even when she was a year-old girl among some of the biggest stars in the film world at the time.
Some of the great actors who worked with her, Zhao Dan, Wei Helin and Qian Qianli, were amazed at her skill and natural performance. For many, it seemed she really was the girl singer Xiaohong. At the age of 17, Zhou Xuan traveled overseas with her then lover Yan Hua. She was feted in Hong Kong and the Philippines. But with her fame came more earnings and she was being paid more than four times the amount of her lover and one-time mentor Yan Hua.
He grew suspicious and jealous and their relationship broke up after nine years. Zhou Xuan was then a household name throughout China. Her films and her recordings were guaranteed hits. It was a rule that whatever film she appeared in, she would sing. In the late s, businessmen in Shanghai began to move to Hong Kong. Major film production companies, actors and actresses were among the migrants. Zhou Xuan found herself in Hong Kong and she achieved the same sort of adulation there.
She was being paid up to taels of gold for a film. She spent the next few years in and out of a mental institutions owing to frequent breakdowns. Through the years, Zhou led a complicated and unhappy life marked by her failed marriages, illegitimate children, and suicide attempts.
Despite having made a total of 43 movies, her favorite film remained Street Angel. In she died in Shanghai in a mental asylum at the age of 37 during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Zhou's diary concluded that she suffered from cerebritis. Zhou Min was widely believed to be the son of the businessman Zhu Huaide, who left for Shanghai in after Zhou Xuan entrusted him with her savings and never returned; Zhou Min was born on that same year. Zhou Wei currently lives in Toronto performing at times in the TTC subways and participating in various musical projects, including teaching.
He is a flautist. The elder of the two, Zhou Xiaoxuan, is a classical pianist trained at Concordia University and now living in Beijing.
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