The actor will soon be featuring on quarter-dollar coins, an honour that reflects a vital yet difficult career in Hollywood’s golden age
The change in your pocket is about to become a little more glamorous. The international film star and fashion icon Anna May Wong has been named the first Asian American to be featured on US currency. As part of the Women Quarters program, which launched by honouring Maya Angelou earlier this year, Wong’s face will appear on quarters in circulation from Monday.
Wong’s career stretched from silent cinema through the talkies and the golden age of Hollywood, to TV. Her first lead role was in the 1922 Technicolor film The Toll of the Sea, and she went on to appear alongside Douglas Fairbanks and Marlene Dietrich. On the small screen she starred in the first US TV show to have an Asian American lead. She was always captivating on camera: in her best roles she is deadly serious, with a provocative air of jazz-age cool.
