Jacqueline Chan obituary
Actor who found fame with the stage and screen versions of The World of Suzie Wong and became a regular on TV
The Chinese Trinidadian actor Jacqueline Chan, who has died aged 91, became a regular on British television after making an impression in the 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong. As Gwennie Lee, she played one of the “Wan Chai girls” alongside Nancy Kwan in the starring role.
Chan had already acted Lily, a similar but smaller part, for the first year of its London stage run at the Prince of Wales theatre (1959-61) in the West End. In December 1959, she took over as the lead character, a Chinese sex worker in Hong Kong having a relationship with an English artist, after Tsai Chin, playing Suzie, fell ill with laryngitis.
Two months later, Chan hit the headlines when Princess Margaret became engaged to the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon). His pictures of Chan had been published around the world and, with news of the royal engagement, newspapers described her as his “good friend” and “favourite model”. In fact, she was an early girlfriend of the photographer.
In 2017, their relationship was depicted in a graphic scene for the TV series The Crown, with Chan played by Alice Hewkin.
One of Armstrong-Jones’s first pictures of Chan, who met him through a friend in 1955, showed her turning the heads of soldiers in Venice. “I did quite a few modelling jobs for him – I wasn’t just his girlfriend,” Chan told me in 2024. “He quite liked my look.”
She attended his wedding to Princess Margaret in 1960 – according to Chan, Armstrong-Jones arranged a car for her and she slipped through a side door into the abbey.
Chan’s career continued as she took over The World of Suzie Wong lead role in the West End and repeated it on an Australian tour in 1961, when one critic noted: “Jacqui Chan, an artist of extraordinary talent, gives the part of Suzie Wong a delicate and moving dignity which deepens the play’s effect greatly.”
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, she was the daughter of Emily (nee Woon-Sam) and Isaac Chan, a photographer who performed as an acrobat in his youth. After leaving Bishop Anstey high school aged 16, she left Trinidad for two years of classical training at Elmhurst ballet school in Camberley, Surrey. Planning to become a ballet teacher, she moved on to the Royal Academy of Dance in London, but left after the first year to take a job as a principal dancer in Goody Two Shoes at the Theatre Royal, Windsor (1953-54).
Chan had her first acting role in The Teahouse of the August Moon (Her Majesty’s theatre, 1954-56), playing a member of the Ladies’ League for Democratic Action, before dancing in Kismet (Stoll theatre, 1956), The King and I on tour (1956-57) and Simply Heavenly (Adelphi theatre, 1958).
Then came the role of Esther, the bright Trinidadian daughter in Errol John’s groundbreaking play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Royal Court, 1958). Wider recognition in The World of Suzie Wong enabled Chan to launch her own cabaret act.
Her first significant television role came in Giles Cooper’s play Without the Grail (1960) as the Communist supporter whose father, the owner of an Assam tea plantation, played by Michael Hordern, is being investigated by an agent (Sean Connery) for his feudal attitudes as an employer.
She was then cast alongside Hollywood royalty as Lotos, one of the Egyptian queen’s handmaidens, in the 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Regular television work followed over the next 20 years with appearances in popular series such as The Saint (1964), Emergency – Ward 10 (1966), The Main Chance (1972) and Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983). She also played the Japanese pearl diver Toshi, a victim of the erupting volcano, in the film Krakatoa: East of Java (1968).
When work took her husband, the actor and director David Saire (born David Salamon), whom she married in 1962, to Amsterdam, she moved there with him. They separated in 1979 (divorcing 10 years later), and Chan returned to London. She continued to appear on TV and in films into her 90s.
“In my younger days, there weren’t interesting parts for Chinese women,” she said in 2024. “We were offered a lot of prostitutes and people who couldn’t speak English properly. I used to say to myself, ‘I’m not doing any parts where I have to say ‘flied lice’ instead of ‘fried rice’.’ If I felt they were demeaning to my race, I wouldn’t do it.” She held firm to that rule when she appeared in the film comedy Peggy Su! (1997), written by Kevin Wong and based on his own experiences as the son of Chinese immigrants to Britain.
Other film roles included Mamma Li, the adoptive mother of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s wife, in Wake of Death (2004), a shady Chinese restaurant owner in the human-trafficking drama Moving Parts (2017) and a jewellery shop assistant in Cruella (2021). On television, she played Shakana, Kaidu’s mother, in the second series of Marco Polo (2016).
Stage roles included Madame Aung in Plenty (Albery theatre, 1999), Mother Cai, a blind masseuse, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon production of Snow in Midsummer (2017) and Molly, a mute patient banging a tray in a geriatric ward threatened with closure, in the Alan Bennett play Allelujah! (Bridge theatre, London, 2018).
Chan co-founded the multicultural Pan Cultural Performance Project (now Pan Intercultural Arts) in 1986 and Chinese Arts Link in 1998, and through them toured her own one-woman shows, which she described as “storytelling with voice and movement”.
Her last screen role was a small part in the film Supergirl, due for release this summer.
Chan is survived by the daughters from her marriage, Abigail and Jaspa, her grandchildren, Jeffrey and Garance, and a brother, Ian.
• Jacqueline Chan, actor and dancer, born 15 July 1934; died 19 May 2026