A 1975 Jane Fonda article in Cineaste includes a photo of the actor-activiststar and her family, along with another woman and a little girl (Georgakas and Rubenstein 1975). The photo is framed tightly in between the article's headline ‘“I prefer films that strengthen people”, an interview with Jane Fonda’, which is written in an extremely large font. A smaller subheading at the end of the page reads, ‘Vietnamese actress Trà Giang and daughter, Jane Fonda and son, and Tom Hayden in a scene from Introduction to the Enemy’. The interview centres entirely on the already famous Fonda and her infamous trip to North Vietnam in 1973; no further information about Trà Giang and her daughter is provided. Trà Giang predictably yielded little attention from the US media in the context of the Cold War, given that Vietnamese socialist cinema was largely condemned as a mere propaganda tool, a view that has continued into the present (Healy 2006, 2010; Hamilton 2009).

Yet Trà Giang (Figure 4.1) is considered a legendary actor of the Vietnamese socialist cinema, associated with the iconic mother-fighter character in wartime Vietnam. A photo of her offering flowers to President Hồ Chí Minh at the 1962 National Festival of Arts (Figure 4.2) was widely circulated by the government, underscoring its cultivation of a close relationship between the arts and politics. Until the present, Trà Giang's name still invokes strong sentiments and positive public memories about the golden age of Vietnamese cinema (1954–75), even though socialist films have fallen out of favour in modern Vietnam, following the economic changes of 1986, known as the Reform. Although she was the first star of the Vietnamese revolutionary cinema to win an international award – she won the best actress prize at the 1974 Moscow Film Festival for her appearance in The Seventeenth Parallel: Day and Night (Vĩ tuyến 17: Ngày và Đêm, Hải Ninh, 1972) – Trà Giang has received little scholarly attention in Western film studies or in research in Vietnam.

Drawing on my interviews with Trà Giang (2016; 2019), archival research and textual analysis, this chapter examines the dynamics of star-making in Vietnam, looking in particular at Trà Giang's stardom and her artistic interventions in socialist filmmaking culture.