Before Halle Berry...

...there was Anna May Wong, who in the 1920's broke down barriers in Hollywood for incredibly hot women, and who is the subject of a recent biography by Graham Russel Gao Hodges of Cornell University. The New York Review of Books has published a review of Hodges' book in their latest print edition, and they conclude that the significance of her career was multifaceted, and note, purely as a matter of academic interest, that she was very hot:



Just so you know I am staying on topic here, and not bringing this up because of her considerable hotness, you sould know that in 1924 she did a film called The Alaskan, in which she played Keok the Eskimo. The following photograph is not from that movie:



In addition to English, she spoke German and French, and could have a bash at Italian and Yiddish as well. She could act, too. Word is she turned in a bravura performance in D. Fairbanks's "Thief of Bagdad". (We'll see about that, Amazon has been notified.) In any event, she really did cross over to some degree, getting treated like a real star despite her ethnicity:



She was a third-generation American, so the interviewer for this article met her at her dad's laundry and was slightly surprised to discover she spoke flapper as well as any white girl.

I think it's all quite interesting. The flappers were not just party girls (well, ok, some of them were), they were spunky, they were engaged with life, they gave as good as they got. They weren't arm candy, and they weren't posers. As stunning as the modern version can be, there is often a dissatisfying shallowness to the performance. Take Bernice Liu, a former Miss Hong Kong and a member of the cast of The Virtues of Harmony, and whom I am citing here purely to make an academic point:



She acknowledges and even apologizes for her wooden performances early in the series. I would say sheis making good progress in learning her craft (I follow her career closely, out of paternal interest). She is beautiful, a fine dancer, has decent stage presence, but she's not an "it" girl.

It's hard to find an "it" girl nowadays, either here or in Hong Kong. No shortage of wannabes, but it's not just about being pretty. It's about being hot, and there's a world of difference between them.