'A Many-Splendored Thing' author Han Suyin dies

Han Suyin, a prolific Eurasian author who generated controversy with her hagiographic view of China's Cultural Revolution and who may be most remembered for her bestselling semi-autobiographical novel that inspired the Hollywood melodrama "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," died Friday at her home in Lausanne, Switzerland. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Yung Mei Tang.

The China-born Han worked many years as a physician, but her writing provided her most enduring, complicated and provocative legacy. She published almost two dozen novels, nonfiction books and memoirs -- and essays for mainstream newspapers and magazines -- often set against the backdrop of historical and generational upheaval in Asia.

Her career as a writer spanned World War II, China's revolution, the Korean War, Communism's rise and the decline of colonialism in East Asia, and included panegyric biographies of Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai.

In her writing and lecturing, most of it during the Cold War, Han cultivated an image of someone capable of unraveling and demystifying for Westerners the political and social developments of the East. At Beijing's Yenching University in the mid-1930s, she studied alongside many who formed the first and second generations of China's Communist party leaders in China.

"Every year the school used to put on the 'Messiah' and it's very funny when I look at some of the people I know in China today, important Communist Party members, and to remember them sitting there in the choir with me singing the 'Messiah' is quite wonderful," from her biography. Several, including "My House Has Two Doors" (1980), explored her upbringing and conflicts of her half-Chinese and half-Belgian heritage.

She became an international literary sensation with "A Many-Splendored Thing," published in 1952. The book was based on her romance with Ian Morrison, a married war correspondent who in 1950 became one of the first journalists killed in the Korean War. The tale of forbidden love, likened by reviewers to "Romeo and Juliet," mixed revolution and romance with news in Hong Kong, China and Korea.

The 1955 film version, "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," featured William Holden and Jennifer Jones. It also spawned an Oscar-winning theme song by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster.