Fifi Young
Indonesian actress
Fifi Young (12 January 1915 – 5 March 1975) was an Indonesian actress of mixed French and Chinese descent who acted in at least 86 films over her 34-year career.
Early life and stage career
Young was born with the name Nonie Tan (Chinese: 陳金娘; pinyin: Chén Jīnniáng; POJ: Tan Kim Nio) in Sungai Liput, Aceh, on 12 January 1915 to a peranakan Chinese mother and French father; her father may have been a serviceman during World War I. After her father died when she was a child, Young and her mother moved to Batavia (modern day Jakarta), where Young completed four years of elementary school at a Dutch-run school for Chinese.
Young first joined the Dewi Dja' troupe as a dancer, using the pseudonym Dewi Maria. She later switched to Miss Riboet's Orion troupe, where she married the playwright Njoo Cheong Seng when she was 14. The elder man coached her in acting and convinced her to take the stage name Fifi Young; Young was the Cantonese equivalent of Njoo's Hokkien surname, while Fifi was meant to be reminiscent of the French actress Fifi D'Orsay. With Miss Riboet, Young travelled throughout South East Asia, including in Malaya.
In 1930 the couple established the Moonlight Crystal Follies in Penang, where Young had her first acting job. By the mid-1930s Young and Njoo had switched to the Dardanella troupe. Young was one of the group's stars, and after most of the group went abroad Young and Njoo established their own troupe, Fifi Young's Pagoda, in 1937.
Film career
After the success of Albert Balink's Terang Boelan in 1937 and The Teng Chun's Alang-Alang in 1939, four new film studios were started.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Fifi Young” is indonesian actress. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fifi, Young and Indonesian, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5447406. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1975, 1930 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fifi Young” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.