It’s 100 years since the release of one of the most outstanding films in Hollywood history. The Thief of Baghdad (1924) was a silent epic that reinvented the medium. Its star and producer was film royalty: Douglas Fairbanks Sr. On specially created-sets that seemed to float in the air he wanted a spectacle that audiences had never seen before. Minarets, the harem, the old bazaar…

As the ‘exotic’ Mongol slave girl he cast teenage Chinese American ingenue Anna May Wong in her first notable film role.

It was clear from the outset that she had star quality. Anna May’s story – her talent, her style and the racism that ultimately thwarted her career – is told in a new biography Not Your China Doll by Katie Gee Salisbury. There’s been talk of a film biopic in the works. Crazy Rich Asians star Gemma Chan has been slated to portray Anna May and also executive produce. Chan appeared on the 2021 Met Gala red carpet dressed in a stunning homage to Wong.

Anna May (2025 is the 120th anniversary of her birth) was thrilled to be plucked from obscurity by Fairbanks, one of the world’s first movie stars, who had fame, fortune and connections: he loved to entertain at his home the likes of Chaplin, Anna Pavlova, Albert Einstein and Henry Ford. ‘Anna May [saw] with her own eyes how the work ethic of the industry’s biggest names had paid off’, writes Salisbury.

Anna May’s intelligence shone through on screen. ‘Unlike most Hollywood starlets she was well read and full of droll repartee, a delight for the eyes and the ears’, says Salisbury. All the while Anna May feared that her future would be limited in America. Hollywood needed a happy ending and had to avoid mixed-race relationships on screen.

She realised she would never be the leading lady. Always doomed to play the dragon queen or the lotus flower. In 1928 Anna May travelled to Berlin to star in Dirty Money, she was only 23. From there she went to Paris and London where she appeared in 1929’s Piccadilly co-starring the young Charles Laughton with a script by Arnold Bennett.

In 1932 she starred in Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich. There were wide-circulating (unsubstantiated) rumours that Anna May and Marlene were a romantic item for a while. Anna May provided, as ever, the spicy side dish. The movie was banned in China which didn’t approve of the film’s politics nor of its depiction of the Chinese as shifty and malign.

With limited choices of roles Anna May’s career stalled; her sister’s tragic death also left its mark. The later years were marred by alcoholism and she died in 1961 at the age of only 56.

Another Hollywood outsider, Christopher Isherwood, was a prolific writer best known for his Berlin stories transmogrified into stage and film adaptations. ‘Isherwood had been on the run ever since he could remember’, writes Katharine Bucknell in a riveting and exhaustive new biography Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out published to coincide with the 120th anniversary of the writer’s birth. ‘He ran away from his schoolmates. He ran from Cambridge University and a proposed academic career. He ran from Hitler’s Berlin. At the height of his fame… he ran west, from New York to Hollywood where he found work writing for the movies and where he embraced a new religion’.

Essayist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and diarist Christopher had an extraordinary life but one often plagued with anxiety. Behind all fears, he wrote, ‘is the most unspeakably terrible of all: the fear of being afraid’. He controlled his own agonising nervousness with the aid of a Hindu guru and in doing so helped usher in the consciousness-raising movement of the 1960s.

Christopher also led a promiscuous gay life. He was an attractive, intelligent and charismatic single man and was often the pursuer and the pursued. He met the love of his life Don Bachardy on Valentine’s Day 1953 and they spent the rest of their lives together.

When he wrote up his louche Berlin experiences of the 1930s in the autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin it got rave reviews. There was a play version and in 1955 a tedious film called I am A Camera. One critic wittily wrote ‘me no Leica!’

The 1966 Kander and Ebb stage musical gave his stories a new lease of life. And the 1972 Oscar-winning movie version made Liza Minelli a superstar. Says Bucknell, ‘Goodbye to Berlin shaped Isherwood’s life from the inside and the outside’. Having a gay hero in a novel when homosexuality was seen as a criminal offence and a mental malady was as daring as it was transgressive.

Born in 1904 Christopher came from a respectable family and was heir to a vast estate. His father was an officer in the British army, his mother a cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson. As a child Christopher lived a life of posh country houses, housemaids and nannies, a far cry from his years as an activist in California. ■

Info: Not Your China Doll by Katie Gee Salisbury (Faber £21), Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell (Chatto and Windus £35)

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