{"id":1089,"date":"2025-06-04T08:01:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T12:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buzzsandbox.movieunlimited.com\/?p=1089"},"modified":"2025-06-04T07:37:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T11:37:27","slug":"keye-luke-number-one-chan-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.moviefanfare.com\/?p=1089","title":{"rendered":"Keye Luke: Hollywood’s Number One Chan Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, however, playing “number-one son” Lee Chan\u00a0was an early stepping stone in a\u00a0 film and TV career that last nearly 60 years.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and he painted a mural used in Joseph von Sternberg’s 1941 drama The Shanghai Gesture, <\/em>as well as\u00a0the auditorium ceiling for Hollywood’s famous Graumann’s Chinese Theatre.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Making his feature film debut in Greta Garbo’s 1934 drama\u00a0 The Painted Veil<\/em><\/a>, Keye landed the part of Lee Chan, with Swedish-born Warner Oland playing his crime-solving dad, in Charlie Chan in Paris<\/em><\/a> the following year. \u00a0The 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<\/em><\/a> (1934); as demented doctor Peter Lorre’s assistant in the M-G-M chiller Mad Love<\/em><\/a> (1935); and as a Chinese villager in The Good Earth <\/em><\/a>(1937).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Fate reunited Luke and Lorre when Oland’s ill health forced Fox to change a planned Charlie Chan at Ringside<\/em> movie into a 1938 entry in Lorre’s Mr. Moto series, Mr. Moto’s Gamble<\/em>, 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<\/em><\/a> (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<\/em><\/a> and The Green Hornet Strikes Again<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a> series, which continued the adventures of Lionel Barrymore’s crusty medico from the Dr. Kildare<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a> 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,\u00a0 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<\/em><\/a> and The Sky Dragon<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The next two decades saw Keye pop up in small roles in such films as Hell’s Half Acre<\/em><\/a> and The Bamboo Prison<\/a> (<\/em>both 1954)<\/em>, William Castle’s Project X <\/em>(1968), and The Hawaiians <\/em><\/a>(1970). He made a memorable 1958 Broadway appearance in the musical Flower Drum Song<\/em> and guest starred in dozens of TV shows, including My Little Margie<\/em>, Gunsmoke<\/em>, Perry Mason<\/em>, I Spy<\/em>, Star Trek<\/em>, and Dragnet<\/em>. “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.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a>. That same year he was featured alongside Yul Brynner and Samantha Eggar in Anna and the King<\/em>, a short-lived TV series based on The King and I<\/em>. 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<\/em><\/a>. Small-screen guest shots in M*A*S*H<\/em>, Magnum, P.I.<\/em>, The A-Team<\/em>, The Golden Girls<\/em> (where he played a gardener who wooed Estelle Getty’s Sophia), and more followed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Luke cemented his cult status by playing the enigmatic shopkeeper Mr. Wing in Joe Dante’s Gremlins<\/em><\/a> and Gremlins 2: The New Batch<\/em><\/a>. His final acting turn was as crotchety herbalist\/healer Dr. Yang in Woody Allen’s Alice<\/em> (1990). \u201cI am very, very grateful at this time and at this point in my total career,\u201d he said in a Starlog magazine interview. \u201cI can still produce and satisfy and go on. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":58034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[529],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1720],"class_list":["post-1089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scene-stealers"],"yoast_head":"\nKeye Luke: Number One Chan Man - A short history<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Keye Luke - From Charlie Chan's Son to David Carradine's Shaolin Master a 60-year career. 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