Olive Young (actress)

She stayed for several years, beginning a career in silent-picture movies. Finding success, she decided to pursue acting in Hollywood. She returned to the United States in 1929. Where she had starred in movies in China, a young attractive urban woman, in Hollywood she was only able to get typed roles. She was signed to play the leading role of a movie, Fools Luck with Hoot Gibson, announced November 17, 1929, but there is no information that the movie was made or released. In her final two films she didn't have named roles. She played the maid in The Man Who Came Back and a singer who sang "a Cantonese ditty in Fu Manchu's underground speakeasy" in The Mask of Fu Manchu.

In 1926 she broke the taboo against kissing in Chinese movies, causing Chinese moviegoers to "gasp".

She traveled to China in 1922 and while there she got into acting, getting her first opportunity with the China Sun Motion Picture Company. She was to perform in Rouge with them, but ended up with the British American Tobacco Company, where she acted in her first three films.

She came to public attention in October 1920 when she was "sixteen" and tried to elope. The newspaper said she was 16, but if she was born in July 1903, she would have been 17. She had to be carried back to her father, who tried to have the White-Slave Traffic Act used against the man she wanted to marry, who was 20. She was sent afterward to a boarding school in Salt Lake City.

Olive Young was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, to a Chinese-American family. Her father Dr. M. F. Young (Mon Fung Young) was born in California and worked as a doctor, running ads in the newspapers advertising his use of Chinese herbal medicines as cures for female diseases, chronic diseases, sexual weakness, kidney and stomach problems, nervous headaches, and rheumatism. Her mother, Chun She Young, a native of China was a housewife. Mrs. Young was listed as Georgia Young, in the 1910 U.S. Census in Kansas City (Ward 6), born in Missouri; however Olive listed her mother as born in China on the 1930 U.S. Census. When Olive was a girl, her parents took her to live in China for "a number of years", staying in Hong Kong. Afterward she attended school for a year in San Francisco and two more in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, before entering Christian College in Excelsior Springs.

Olive Young (June 21, 1903 – October 5, 1940), sinocized as Aili Yang (楊愛立) on the movie screen, was an American-born film actress in China.