01, green campus years
1936, Jiao Huang was born in Beijing, since childhood, the family is well off, his father graduated from Yenching University, served as the Central Bank of the Xiangliang, his mother is the first generation of the local female teachers.
But the Lugou Bridge Incident broke out the year after Jiao's birth, and the turmoil of the war sent Jiao traveling south with his family from the age of six, from Beijing to Chongqing to Shanghai.
At the age of eight, Jiao happened to see Chen Baichun's "No Pissing" and Song Zhi's "The State Comes First" in Chongqing, and from then on, he was y enamored of the art of the stage.
Because he grew up in Beijing, Jiao spoke fluent Mandarin, and when he was in the fourth grade of elementary school in Chongqing, he was recommended by his teacher to a local theater group, where he was cast in a role of an anti-war hero.
Even though Jiao made jokes in the theater because he couldn't read well enough to pronounce "forgiveness" as "original shock," the joy of acting in person has been unforgettable.
In junior high school, Jiao followed his family to Shanghai, where he joined his school's drama group and was active in various theater activities.
The experience of being in the drama group made him more determined for the future, and despite his father's opposition, Jiao was determined to enter the Shanghai Theater Academy at that time.
He kept himself in shape by playing softball and other sports while reading a wide range of cultural books to increase his humanistic qualities.
Eventually, in 1955, Jiao was admitted to the Shanghai Theater Academy.
If Jiao's previous experiences were what got him interested in theater, his time at the Shanghai Theater Academy really put him in awe of it.
Jiao's class at the time included not only famous Chinese professors such as Xiong Fosi and Zhu Duanjun, but also Lepkovskaya, an expert from the Soviet Union.
In Lepkovskaya's first class, she asked Jiao and a few other boys to go to the carpentry shop and bring back a pile of wood in various shapes, such as triangles and squares, as a meet-and-greet gift.
"This is a set of enlarged blocks that you can use your imagination to put together into various scenes and build a life in them." She told each member of the class,
"Have you ever observed this? When children play house, they are never there for the audience, but for their opponents. From now on, you will approach acting as purely and sincerely as children approach playing."
Lepkovskaya's words carried over into every performance of Jiao's subsequent theater career, honoring the audience, honoring the stage and always being true.
In addition to this, Lepkovskaya often allowed her students to conceptualize, choreograph and perform their own improvisational skits. During that time, Jiao and his classmates went into performance every morning from the moment they opened their eyes.
The 19 students in the class, divided into several "crews," started out on their own, but if they met on campus, they had to work with each other to get into each other's skits quickly.
This is often the case - Jiao Huang is playing "Blessing" with other students, and another group of students who happened to be playing "How Iron is Made" came over, and they happened to be playing to the Red Army soldiers checking their papers, and Jiao had to pull out his student ID right away to accept the "check". "The storyline and the lines were completely free to play out.
In an instant, you have to be "in the movie", which is a good exercise for their reflexes, adaptability and imagination. The time at the theater was arguably the happiest part of Jiao's youth.
02, emotional frustration, the trough of life
In 1959, Jiao graduated from the Shanghai Theater Academy, and entered the Shanghai Theater Academy Experimental Drama Troupe as expected.
Jiao Huang met his first wife, Ms. Chen, when he was running in the theater, and soon the two of them got married because of their talent and interest in drama.
Happy relationship, engaged in their own love, at that time everything is simple and beautiful.
However, later, Jiao Huang's life fell into the trough, his wife also left him, far away from home.
The best years of his life were forced to isolate himself from the stage, coupled with the thinness of his wife's feelings, all of which left Jiao Huang, who had not been involved in the world for a long time, y shocked, and the pain was hard to let go of, and at one time he thought of taking the easy way out.
Later, Jiao went to work in the countryside, and even during those years when he gave up drama, he didn't really give up acting. Every day when he was working on the ground, Jiao practiced acting in his mind.
While the work in the countryside was grueling, Jiao was blessed with love.
In the countryside, he met Ms. Zhou, an educated youth, and they fell in love and got married soon after, thanks to their similar circumstances and the companionship they found in each other's hardships.
But the marriage didn't last long, and they went their separate ways.
The failure of another relationship completely shattered Jiao Huang, leaving him completely devastated. Fortunately, his mother was able to get to him in time to save him from death, and he was able to get through this low point in his life.
03, the bitter end of the sweet, a play to seal God
Whatever can not break you, will eventually make you stronger.
After surviving that decade and entering the 1980s, the spring of reform and opening up shone on him, and Jiao Huang returned to the theater stage.
Since the 1980s, Jiao has rushed to stage "Eastward! Eastward! and Much Ado About Nothing, among other classic plays.
Standing on the stage, he is more refined by the years and the vicissitudes of life. However, when the spotlight diffused through the curtains and spilled onto the stage, people again saw the fire-like eyes of a decade ago.
After that, Jiao Huang acted in TV dramas "Yongzheng Dynasty" and "Han Wu Da Di", winning numerous awards. But the screen has brought him more income and fame than the stage, and he is not the least bit attached to it.
Besides these historical dramas, Jiao rarely takes on scripts, and instead focuses all his energy on the theater stage.
When he was allowed to return to the stage, it was only fifteen years before he retired. At his age, Jiao accelerated his race against the clock, with "Under the Red Flag" and "The Minister of Qin", almost one big play a year on the stage.
When it came time to rehearse, Jiao moved his bunk and lived in the Shanghai Youth Drama Troupe. Friends recalled that Jiao was scrambling to make up for lost time.
According to statistics, from 1977 to his retirement in 1992, Jiao acted in 11 plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, The Mourning Trilogy, Scrooge, Born But Not Born, Died But Not Brought, and The Death of a Negro Sergeant, earning him the reputation of "Prince of Shakespeare".
In 2009, the old students of the 1959 acting class of the Shanghai Theater decided to re-stage their unfinished graduation play, Gogol's famous "The Minister of Qinzai".
The troupe gave a daily allowance of 100 yuan to the actors who came to the rehearsal, which was enough for a round-trip taxi ride and a box lunch at noon, and the final payment was 20,000 yuan per person.
Rehearsals for "Antony and Cleopatra," Jiao Huang only got 1,000 yuan more than other actors. He also wasn't allowed to jack up ticket prices, which topped out at 480 yuan for this play.
The producer was anxious that the cost of the tickets would be too much to bear.
Jiao said, "I don't care. Those junior high school students who watched my play back then are now old men and women in their 60s, with very little pension, so I won't let them take so much money to see the play."
Jiao Huang doesn't care at all about compensation, he enjoys the stage and the art itself:
"Money is something that really has no bottom. I won't do a play that doesn't have any artistic pursuit, no matter how much money I'm paid. Besides, what do I need so much money for? The important thing for an actor to act and devote himself to creation is to enjoy a process. For me, no joy in life can be compared to the joy of creation."
Unlike his indifference to money, Jiao is a stickler for drama. He does every chore himself.
Even after he retired, Jiao had to think about every play he rehearsed, from planning, fundraising, production, market pricing, and even the way the sets and props would go after the show.
He looked for friends, the "Tiger Creeps" costumes, props stored in a school warehouse; "Chinchilla" costumes, sets placed in a friend's factory; "Antony and Cleopatra" costumes to take home, thinking that this set of costumes can be rehearsed another Roman play, "otherwise, put wherever you have to ask for money. "
After the success of his career, Jiao Huang has attracted a female reporter, Chen Xiaoli, in his relationship. In Chen Xiaoli's active pursuit, Jiao Huang once again summoned up the courage to enter into marriage, two people gave birth to a daughter, a happy life
04, emaciated bones, a lifetime of love
2015, in the Ninth China Drama Golden Lion Award ceremony, the organizing committee will be the highest award "Lifetime Honor Award" awarded to the then Jiao Huang, who was 78 years old at the time. They praised him as "a staunch adherent and practitioner of realist drama performance".
Jiao has portrayed himself as an artist of both virtues and virtues through his words and actions. He has never had any hype, never had any scandal, and has been an honest actor and a decent human being all his life.
More than fifty years of theater life, as described in a poem written to him by a 90-year-old theater fan:
"Look at that old man/shaking on the stage for more than fifty years/thin only left the play/Yo ooh ooh ooh ......"
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