Olive Young (; June 21, 1903 â October 5, 1940) was an American-born film actress in China.
Of Chinese ancestry, she visited China, where she may have been the first female motion picture photographer and movie director in China. Later in life she became an American actress and a touring Blues singer. A cover-girl for Liangyou pictorial magazine, she was labeled a flapper, a career woman, part of the movement of modern independent women worldwide which also included China's "new-age woman" (æ°æÂÂ代女æ§) or "modern miss" (æ©ç»å°Âå§Â), and the Japanese "modern girl".
In 1926 she broke the taboo against kissing in Chinese movies, causing Chinese moviegoers to "gasp".
Olive Young was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, to a Chinese-American family. Her father Dr. M. F. Young (Mon Fung Young) was born in California and worked as a doctor, running ads in the newspapers advertising his use of Chinese herbal medicines as cures for female diseases, chronic diseases, sexual weakness, kidney and stomach problems, nervous headaches, and rheumatism. Her mother, Chun She Young, a native of China was a housewife. Mrs. Young was listed as Georgia Young, in the 1910 U.S. Census in Kansas City (Ward 6), born in Missouri; however Olive listed her mother as born in China on the 1930 U.S. Census. When Olive was a girl, her parents took her to live in China for "a number of years", staying in Hong Kong. Afterward she attended school for a year in San Francisco and two more in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, before entering Christian College in Excelsior Springs.
She came to public attention in October 1920 when she was "sixteen" and tried to elope. The newspaper said she was 16, but if she was born in July 1903, she would have been 17. She had to be carried back to her father, who tried to have the White-Slave Traffic Act used against the man she wanted to marry, who was 20. She was sent afterward to a boarding school in Salt Lake City.
Although she had a college education and pressure from her father to study medicine, she rejected that. She told a reporter from the Oregonian, "The subject didn't interest me. I wanted adventure."
She traveled to China in 1922 and while there she got into acting, getting her first opportunity with the China Sun Motion Picture Company. She was to perform in Rouge with them, but ended up with the British American Tobacco Company, where she acted in her first three films.
She stayed for several years, beginning a career in silent-picture movies. Finding success, she decided to pursue acting in Hollywood. She returned to the United States in 1929. Where she had starred in movies in China, a young attractive urban woman, in Hollywood she was only able to get typed roles. She was signed to play the leading role of a movie, Fools Luck with Hoot Gibson, announced November 17, 1929, but there is no information that the movie was made or released. (Apparently released under the title "Trailing Trouble". Same dates and costars as Fools Luck). In her final two films she didn't have named roles. She played the maid in The Man Who Came Back and a singer who sang "a Cantonese ditty in Fu Manchu's underground speakeasy" in The Mask of Fu Manchu.
Following her film career, she moved on to music, traveling and performing a mix of blues and Chinese music.
It was thought that none of Young's Chinese movies are known to have survived. However, there is now a partial clip of one of her movies, Daxia Gan Fengchi (大侠çÂÂé£Âæ± Dàxiá gÃÂnfÃÂngchÃÂ) that has been recovered and is online. In this clip there is only a glimpse of Olive Young, near the end, playing a young woman. The only other film footage of her is in her American movies, Trailin' Trouble, The Man Who Came Back, and The Mask of Fu Manchu.