Dressed to Kill: The Films of Lily Ho

By any criteria you’d care to name, INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN is an outstanding example of a cult film. As luridly over-the-top as the name suggests, the film is also a witty historical pastiche inspired by classic Chinese story-telling.  The rape-revenge scenario can be tricky for an actress to pull off without looking sleazy, but Lily Ho, playing the unwilling prostitute Ai Nu, maintains her dignity throughout the film. She’d had a lot of practice by 1972, when IMTIMATE CONFESSIONS was made. Miss Ho was Hong Kong’s classiest bad girl, adept at implying much and showing little.  

    Lily Ho was born in Taiwan in 1946, and joined the Shaw Brothers studio in 1965 as a promising young starlet. The first indication of her ability to stand out from the other young beauties at the studio came in THE KNIGHT OF KNIGHTS (1966). Ho has a semi-nude bathing scene in the film, although she apparently used a body double for at least some of the shots. For the actresses at Shaw’s, shooting a sex scene of any kind risked limiting their future options to only the bawdiest productions. As Lily Ho’s career progressed, she was very successful at skirting the edge of the sex-film ghetto, and instead using her edginess to play the kind of woman who meets the guys on their own terms. The kind of heroine, in fact, who is a staple of the wuxia genre – the wandering swordswoman.   

  And Lily Ho did play a swordswoman, repeatedly, and did a pretty credible job of it. Kung fu was never her specialty, but she could strike a pose and dispatch the bad guy without embarrassing herself. Her real specialty was being the ballsiest chick in the room. She could play a victim, but you always knew her heart wasn’t in it. Give her stiletto heels and a gun and some poor sap groveling at her feet, however, and she was in her element. It didn’t hurt that the mod fashions and beehive hairdos of the period looked so good on her too.  

She retired from the screen in 1974 at the peak of her career, after appearing in iconic films like Chor Yuan’s THE HOUSE OF 72 TENANTS (1973) and Chang Cheh’s ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS (1975).Her cross-dressed lead in the period actioner THE 14 AMAZONS (1972) garnered her an Outstanding Lead Female Performance Award at the 19th Asian Film Festival. After her marriage to businessman George Chao, she became a successful entrepreneur, running fashion boutiques and a marketing firm. She now lives in Shanghai, where she owns a stylish French restaurant called Club Shanghai.  

More information about Lily Ho can be found here.  

And here’s a Youtube clip from INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN

Tags: Lily Ho, swordswomen