Lady Tsen Mei

A formidable-looking and very enterprising Chinese-born actress in the U.S. from 1900, Lady Tsen Mei was part of the Betzwood Film Company, founded in 1918 at the suburban Philadelphia Betzwood estate, the former home of the pioneering Lubin Mfg. Company. Helping to keep Pennsylvania filmmaking alive, Lady Tsen Mei and cowboy actor Louis Bennison each starred in a series of low-budget melodramas released by Goldwyn between 1918 and 1922. Tsen Mei's most notable films were For the Freedom of the East (1918), a seven-reel melodrama produced by Betzwood, and her own production of Lotus Blossom (1921), which was directed by J. Frank Glendon and featured such Anglo actors as Noah Beery and Tully Marshall made up to look Asian. Leaving films in favor of vaudeville after the demise of Betzwood, Lady Tsen Mei returned to play Li-Ti, the Chinese "other woman" in the first version of Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1929). Retired from performing, she later operated a booking agency with her husband in Norfolk, VA, where she was known locally as Mrs. Josephine Kramer. Long forgotten by even the most ardent of silent-film devotees, this interesting actress was proof positive that the early silent era cinema not only opened the doors for white women but also briefly allowed women of color to prosper.

~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide