July 31, 1939—France Nuyen, whose exotic
Eurasian looks enabled her to carve out a small but precious niche in Hollywood
from the Fifties to Seventies, was born in Marseille, France, to a French
mother and Vietnamese father.
The striking actress-model came to my attention in a
show I recall from my impressionable youth: Star Trek. Several years ago, when I rediscovered this particular episode, “Elaan of Troyius,” from the sci-fi series’ third and final season, what struck me
were its seriocomic allusions to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Antony
and Cleopatra, Shaw’s Pygmalion, and, of course, in its title (a
sound-alike of Helen of Troy, the world’s most beautiful woman), The Iliad.
In the series’ characteristic way, its depiction of
the title character looks backward (to the above literary sources that
dramatize a young woman, often a foreign princess, intent on getting her way
against an older male from outside her environment) and forward (it would
provide a major theme of spinoffs The Next Generation, Deep Space
Nine and Voyager—the crew tasked to transport foreign dignitaries
amid intergalactic peril).
But what struck me as a youngster was not any of
this literary or pop-culture analysis, but the way that Elaan turned
square-jawed, resolute, brave Capt. James T. Kirk into a hopeless puddle of
passion through the drop of a tear.
“Oh, oh, here we go again. The old juice...stronger
than any acid,” Spencer Tracy snorted at wailing wife Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s
Rib. But ol’ Spence might have reacted differently in the presence of Ms.
Nuyen’s hot-tempered but comely alien.
Several Internet sites (notably, the Internet Movie Data
Base) suggest that Ms. Nuyen might have been the first person of Vietnamese
descent to appear on American television. I am unable to prove or disprove that
assertion. But I think it would certainly be correct to say that she was the
first actress with such ancestry to make her mark on the big screen and TV.
She
came along during a post-WWII atmosphere in which Americans thought back to their
recent encounters with Asians—with a strong undercurrent of male wish
fulfillment about females of this race, in particular.
In an interview for a TCM film festival discussion on “Race and Hollywood,” a
now-middle-aged Nuyen reflected, “I think those films are popular because the
American people like to feel that they have overcome their racism, that they
have overcome their blind, cruel prejudices, and that they are no longer of
that society.”
Indicative of that would certainly be the 1958 movie adaptation of South
Pacific, in which Ms. Nuyen played Liat, or I Spy, the popular series of
the mid-to-late Sixties, where she acted and fell in love with her eventual
second husband, Robert Culp.
But she made a more enduring impression through her Star
Trek appearance—not only because the series has played somewhere all the
time all over Earth in the half-century since NBC canceled it, but also because
sci-fi fans—and especially aficionados of this show—are so obsessive.
It’s indisputable that, amid the murky,
fight-for-survival vibes of the show’s last season, “Elaan of Troyius” cannot
be ignored. In a post on “The Movie Blog,” “Darren” speaks for a
not-inconsiderable portion of the show’s fan base offended by the perceived
sexist and racist teleplay by John Meredyth Lucas.
But if you look at many comments on a YouTube
segment from this episode, there is an equally large component of the fan base
who could care less about any of that. Elaan’s alien tears might have been the
functional equivalent of the love potion from Tristan and Isolde.
But
the (overwhelmingly male) YouTube commentators I read thought that was an
unnecessary plot device. Captain Kirk was so randy, they figured, that, once he
got a good luck at Elaan’s skimpy outfit, he’d be a goner for her, anyway.
(In an interview for StarTrek.com four years ago, Ms. Nuyen remembered that her costumes only finished being sewed on her just before she went on camera, and her heavy Cleopatra-style wig, because it didn't turn at the same speed as her head, could end up with half of it on the wrong side of her face.)
Unconsciously but certainly, I absorbed one
overwhelming lesson from this episode even at this early age: When in the
presence of an attractive woman, a male authority figure is unlikely to think
with his brain.
All the pushing, grabbing, throwing around, and—oh
yes, passionate clinches—between Kirk and Elaan must have required a certain
level of comfort between William Shatner and Ms. Nuyen. Indeed, they had acted
together a decade before filming this show, during the Broadway run of The
World of Susie Wong, and they would appear together again as a sea captain
and his wife in a 1974 episode of Kung Fu, and in The Horror at 37,000 Feet.
I wonder, over the years, if Ms. Nuyen ever had
occasion to share thoughts with another person of Asian descent associated with
Star Trek, George Takei, on the trials and tribulations of landing
acting jobs and fighting racial stereotypes at that point in Hollywood history?
The whole struggle may have gotten to Ms. Nuyen, who, aside from a role in the
1993 film The Joy Luck Club, has not been as prominent onscreen in the
last 40 years.
