Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema by Tom Lisanti

Author:Tom Lisanti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2012-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Also:

Burke’s Law, Naked City and The Eleventh Hour.

Irene Tsu

During the 1960s, beautiful Chinese actress Irene Tsu played a variety of “native” girls in a number of popular drive-in films including Sword of Ali Baba, the beach movie How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Paradise, Hawaiian Style with Elvis. Tsu had poise and talent which was noticed by producer-writer Arthur C. Pierce, who wrote the part of a space traveler in Women of the Prehistoric Planet with her in mind. It was her first starring role. She then played a South Vietnamese spy in The Green Berets, John Wayne’s homage to our boys in Vietnam, before becoming part of the spy boom. She portrayed a geisha on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and a fashion model in the secret agent spoof Caprice starring Doris Day. The 1970s saw Irene mature into a fine actress as she progressed from exotic parts to playing doctors, lawyers, and scientists in both film and television. But she was at her most fun when she abandoned her sweet, docile image to play a karate-chopping terrorist in Paper Tiger and a police detective in the martial arts film Hot Potato with Jim Kelly. “I really don’t consider myself a sixties performer,” reveals Irene. “It wasn’t until the seventies [that] I became more aware of my standing as an actress.” Irene still acts today (The Single Guy, Star Trek: Voyager, etc.) and is a successful real estate agent.

Irene Tsu was born in Shanghai on November 4 to Z. M. and Dulcie Lynn Tsu. When the Communists took over in 1949 she and her family fled first to Formosa and then to Hong Kong, where they remained for six years before immigrating to New York. Her father, an economics adviser to the Nationalist Chinese government, remained in Hong Kong. Once in the U.S., Tsu began ballet training, which was her stepping stone into the performing arts. At age 14, she borrowed her aunt’s cheongsam and got the role of Gwenny in the road company of The World of Susie Wong. Her friendship with the play’s star Nancy Kwan led to a small part as one of the teenage dancers in the 1961 film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song starring Kwan and James Shigeta. “Nancy got me an audition with choreographer Hermes Pan,” remembers Irene with a laugh. “I was terrified because I thought he was Fred Astaire—they looked so much alike! He hired me as a dancer and later cast me as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaidens in Cleopatra. This was a very wild time for me. I was a crazy teenager who looked mature for my age. I was 14 passing for 21 and I was off to Rome by myself. My mom was an artist so she just let me do whatever I wanted—or maybe she had no clue to what was going on. Neither did I.”

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