Warner Oland

Well it is just depressingly difficult to find an image of Warner Oland not in yellowface. Repeated costar Keye Luke said all he did to appear Chinese was change a few details of his facial hair, and Oland claimed that people would address him in Chinese on the assumption that he actually spoke it. The fact remains that a man who played Charlie Chan repeatedly, not to mention Fu Manchu and any number of other Asian characters, was in fact from Sweden. And it’s not as though there were no Chinese actors in Hollywood at the time because did I mention Keye Luke?

I am fascinated by the fact that his IMDb biography tells you that his obscure Swedish hometown is sixty kilometers away from another Swedish town I’ve never heard of instead of that it is in fact fairly close to Stockholm. Anyway, he moved to the US shortly after his thirteenth birthday. He spent some time on Broadway and moved to Hollywood during the silent era. The first Asian character I can find for him is a maharajah in 1918’s The Naulahka.

Oland would forever be enshrined in film history for playing the Cantor in The Jazz Singer. So okay, he was only six years older than his screen son, and so what if he were no more Jewish than he was Chinese? It’s an extremely important moment in film, and Oland was part of it. Few people watch the movie anymore, and fewer remember Oland, but it’s a better memory of him than a lot of them. The movie is schmaltzy and incredibly dated and technologically limited, but none of that matters.

Oland himself would decline into alcoholism over the years. He had been married to English playwright and painter Edith Gardener Shearn. She learned Swedish, and they translated the plays of August Strindberg together. However, his alcoholism increased to the point that she divorced him after thirty years together. This was not helped by his increasingly erratic behaviour. He was actually prevented by the courts from moving himself and his funds overseas. When the divorce was finalized, he went back to Sweden and died of alcoholism-related causes.

So why all the yellowface? Oland himself claimed that his Russian grandmother had Mongolian ancestry. While this is possible, given Genghis Khan, it’s certainly not proven and there is no evidence that anyone can trace that she had Mongolian ancestry. In Sweden, it’s generally assumed that he had Sami ancestry, but there’s no evidence of that, either. Though I suppose there’s no evidence that he didn’t. Either way, by Hollywood standards, he looked Asian, and at least he wasn’t taping his eyelids, I guess.