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Hero of the Month for November 2005Victor Sen Yung
Few actors have started out so far behind the eight ball and managed to overcome it to carve out a respectable career for themselves as Victor Sen Yung was able to do. Many actors find it difficult to replace an established star in a popular series, but Yung was put in the unenviable position of coming out of nowhere to replace Keye Luke in Fox's immensely popular Charlie Chan series when Luke departed after Warner Oland unexpectedly passed away (kind of like George Lazenby replacing Sean Connery as James Bond only with longer lasting results).
According to Jon Tuska in his book The Detective in Hollywood, director H. Bruce Humberstone is reported to have demanded that Keye Luke be brought back during the first day of filming Charlie Chan In Honolulu (1938), right in front of Yung. It is to the actor's credit that he was able to overcome a decidedly shaky beginning to establish himself comfortably in the series, evolving into a capable performer of comedic talent who played well off of Toler's irascible Charlie Chan through eleven films until the series was canceled in 1942 with Castle In the Desert (1942).
Without a studio contract Yung began freelancing. Since it was the middle of a war, it came as no surprise that he spent those years in the mid to late forties playing Japanese villains in films like Little Tokyo USA (1942) and Betrayal From the East (1944). After the war Yung returned to his former role of Jimmy Chan opposite Sidney Toler's now even grumpier Charlie Chan , now at Monogram, in Shadows Over Chinatown (1946). Somehow along the way through eight films in two years he morphed into Beson Fong's character Tommy Chan when Toler died and Roland Winters was brought in to continue the series. Keye Luke returned to the series as Lee Chan in Yung's final film The Feathered Serpent (1948), almost as if he was returning the baton that Luke has passed to him ten years earlier.
Back to being a freelance actor, he also returned to villainous roles, only now he was a Communist agent in films like Peking Express (1951), Target Hong Kong (1952) , Shanghai Story (1954) and Jet Attack (1958). Along the way he appeared in his only serial, playing spy hunting Harry Lauter's right hand man in Republic's Trader Tom of the China Seas (1954). From there his career took him to Broadway where he had a supporting role in Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Flower Drum Song, which he would reprise in the 1961 film version.
After Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), Yung had little time for film work due to his semi-regular role as Hop Sing on the long running western hit show Bonanza. After the show ended in the early seventies, Yung garnered another recurring role on David Carradine's popular, though short lived, western/martial arts hybrid TV show Kung Fu. He worked sporadically after that, his final film being the affectionate spoof of forties detective films The Man With Bogart's Face (1980).
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