Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City during the Second World War, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained
Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien;
Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician
Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American
Aline MacMahon, no longer one of the wisecracking
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), as the wife of Ling Tang; English born
Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)) as the Third Cousin;" Irish-America
J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish-American
Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and
Meryl Streep's teacher at the Yale Drama School as the Japanese Captain Sato.
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