wthellokitty:

Maylia, AKA Mrs. Benson Fong

Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, Maylia — real name: Gloria Chin — was just a 20-year-old coed vacationing in Hollywood when she was spotted in a restaurant by the wife of writer-producer Sidney Buchman. She was asked to audition for a role in Buchman’s big-budget project, To the Ends of the Earth, and voilà! — a star was born. Of course, she would need to change her name to something more befitting the “first Chinese starlet since Anna May Wong”, something a little more exotic. According to the studio publicity, “Maylia is her name, and in Cantonese it means beautiful” (The Huntingdon Daily News, March 3, 1947).* Around the same time, Gloria underwent another name change. Within days of signing her contract with Columbia Pictures, she had a fateful meeting with actor Benson Fong (best known at the time as Charlie Chan’s “number three son”). It must have been love at first sight, because the two got hitched a few weeks later.