Hu Die (1907-1989) had a career as a film actress from the late 1920s to the 1960s. She had her most brilliant period in the 1930s and the 1940s. Early in the 1930s, she played the leading role in China's first sound film, The Singsong Girl, in which she portrays a kindhearted but somewhat ignorant woman who endures her husband's mistreatment and oppression without the slightest resistance. In The River Flows Rampant, the first film made by the left-wing dramatists, she plays the role of Xiujuan, a woman who is filled with the spirit of resistance and has a rich inner world in her heart. Her performance won favorable comments.

The double leading roles she played in Twin Sisters brought her to the height of her performing art. She played the roles of Dabao and Erbao, twin sisters who have different dispositions, a great disparity in their social statuses, and different roads of life. The film broke the record for cinema occupancy of domestic films in the 1930s. Later, it won acclaim when shown in Japan and in Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

Hu Die played a full spectrum of characters, including a maidservant, a loving mother, a woman school teacher, an actress, a prostitute, a dancing girl, the daughter of a rich family, a laboring woman, and a factory worker. She had attractive, unconventional qualities, and her performances were gentle, honest, refined and sweet. The audiences call her a film queen. Hu Die lived both in the silent and sound film periods, and she was one of the best Chinese film actors and actresses in the 1930s and the 1940s.