One of the most thankless acting jobs in movies must have been as one of Charlie Chan’s would-be detective offspring. After all, how many ways can an performer say “Gee whiz, pop!”? For the venerable Keye Luke, however, playing “number-one son” Lee Chan was an early stepping stone in a film and TV career that last nearly 60 years.
Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1904. Luke came to the U.S. at age three when his family settled in Seattle. He moved to Southern California as a young man and worked, not as an actor, but as a commercial artist and technical advisor on Asian-themed films. Luke’s artwork was featured in RKO’s pressbook for the original King Kong and he painted a mural used in Joseph von Sternberg’s 1941 drama The Shanghai Gesture, as well as the auditorium ceiling for Hollywood’s famous Graumann’s Chinese Theatre.
Making his feature film debut in Greta Garbo’s 1934 drama The Painted Veil, Keye landed the part of Lee Chan, with Swedish-born Warner Oland playing his crime-solving dad, in Charlie Chan in Paris the following year. The on-screen chemistry between the pair helped drive the 20th Century-Fox series, with Luke and Oland teaming up for seven more Chan whodunits over the next three years. Meanwhile, Luke also appeared as a native soldier in Warner Bros./First National’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1934); as demented doctor Peter Lorre’s assistant in the M-G-M chiller Mad Love (1935); and as a Chinese villager in The Good Earth (1937).
Fate reunited Luke and Lorre when Oland’s ill health forced Fox to change a planned Charlie Chan at Ringside movie into a 1938 entry in Lorre’s Mr. Moto series, Mr. Moto’s Gamble, with Luke’s Lee Chan crossing over to lend a hand. Keye got the chance to play a lead detective when he replaced Boris Karloff as Mr. Wong in Monogram’s Phantom of Chinatown (1940), and he co-starred as the Green Hornet’s sidekick Kato (whose nationality was changed from Japanese to Korean due to World War II) in the 1940 Universal serials The Green Hornet and The Green Hornet Strikes Again.
The 1940s gave Luke another recurring role when M-G-M tapped him for Brooklyn-born intern Dr. Lee Wong How in their Dr. Gillespie series, which continued the adventures of Lionel Barrymore’s crusty medico from the Dr. Kildare films. He appeared in five of the six entries from 1942 to 1947 (along with a cameo as Lee in Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble from 1944). It was no doubt a refreshing change for the actor to be in a relatively non-stereotypical character, particularly since but his screen time in that decade was usually limited to playing servants, freedom-fighting Chinese, and the occasional Japanese villain. He even reprised his “number-one son” persona opposite Roland Winters’ Charlie Chan in two Monogram programmers, The Feathered Serpent and The Sky Dragon.
The next two decades saw Keye pop up in small roles in such films as Hell’s Half Acre and The Bamboo Prison (both 1954), William Castle’s Project X (1968), and The Hawaiians (1970). He made a memorable 1958 Broadway appearance in the musical Flower Drum Song and guest starred in dozens of TV shows, including My Little Margie, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, I Spy, Star Trek, and Dragnet. “Because of my appearance, or because of my personality, or whatever it may be,” Luke was quoted in an interview, ” I was always put into good Boy Scout roles: lawyers, doctors, business executives and tycoons, the nice Chinese guy down the block.”
1972 was a long-delayed breakthrough time for Luke, with him co-starring as David Carradine’s sightless Shaolin mentor, Master Po, in the TV movie and subsequent series Kung Fu. That same year he was featured alongside Yul Brynner and Samantha Eggar in Anna and the King, a short-lived TV series based on The King and I. And 1972 saw Keye finally get the chance to play Charlie Chan, albeit in voice form, in the Saturday morning cartoon series The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan. Small-screen guest shots in M*A*S*H, Magnum, P.I., The A-Team, The Golden Girls (where he played a gardener who wooed Estelle Getty’s Sophia), and more followed.
Luke cemented his cult status by playing the enigmatic shopkeeper Mr. Wing in Joe Dante’s Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch. His final acting turn was as crotchety herbalist/healer Dr. Yang in Woody Allen’s Alice (1990). “I am very, very grateful at this time and at this point in my total career,” he said in a Starlog magazine interview. “I can still produce and satisfy and go on. It’s as new to me today as it ever was.” Luke passed away from complications from a stroke at age 86 in January of 1991, just a few weeks after receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.