Biography
Zhao first became famous working in the Mingxing Film Company in the 1930s including playing opposite Zhou Xuan in Street Angel (1937). After the war, Zhao began a creative relationship with director Zheng Junli, with films such as the 1948 anti-Kuomintang drama-comedy, Crows and Sparrows.
Zhao remained on the mainland following the Communist victory in 1949 and continued to make films throughout the 1950s and 1960s notably in biographical films playing historical figures of Nie Er, Lin Zexu (both films were directed by Zheng) and Li Shizhen.
He joined Communist Party of China in 1957. During Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted and imprisoned for 5 years. He died of pancreatic cancer in Beijing in 1980.
He was married to Ye Luqian in 1936. When he was arrested by Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang in 1939, it was rumored he had been dead. Thus Ye was married to playwright Du Xuan. After the war, he was released and returned to Shanghai. He later was married to Huang Zongying.
Read more about this topic: Zhao Dan
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)