Nancy Kwan

Lives in Los Angeles when she's not on location. [2004]

Her only son, Bernie Pock, died June 5, 1996 after he contracted AIDS from a relationship with an older woman whom he later married. Nancy Kwan penned a book entitled, "Celebration of a Life: Memories of my Son".

In a 1993 interview, she revealed she turned down a role in The Joy Luck Club (1993) due to a disagreement over the script.

They returned to the US in 1979 so that her teenage son, Bernie Pock, could complete his education. He was a martial-arts master, fluent in Chinese, and became a stunt coordinator and actor before his untimely death.

She also acted in a spate of films made for Southeast Asian audiences, including "Fear" (1977) (aka Night Creature (1978)), which introduced her to filmmaker Norbert Meisel, who became her third husband.

She followed it the next year with the hit musical, Flower Drum Song (1961), and became one of Hollywood's most visible Asian actresses.

At just 18, Nancy Kwan was studying dance with England's Royal Ballet School, when she was spotted by producer Ray Stark, who tested her and gave her the starring role of a free-spirited Hong Kong prostitute who captivates artist William Holden in The World of Suzie Wong (1960).

Born in China to a Chinese father and British mother, Kwan spent the 1960s commuting between film roles in America and Europe (including the pilot for Hawaii Five-O (1968)), but faded from view in the West, when she returned to her native Hong Kong in 1972 to be with her critically ill father. Divorced from her second husband, screenwriter David Giler, and with a young son from her first marriage to Austrian hotelier Peter Pock, Kwan intended to stay a year, but wound up staying a decade. As managing director of her own production company, she produced and directed dozens of commercials for the Southeast Asia market.