Lotus Long's father was Japanese and her mother was an ethnic Hawaiian.
The family came to California in the 1920s and, because of her exotic
beauty, Lotus didn't find it difficult to get into the movies and
portrayed a succession of various Asian women. She took the stage name
"Lotus Long", and was generally assumed to be Chinese--something she
later relied on to avoid internment with others of Japanese ancestry
during WWII.
She met cameraman
James Knott while
in the Arctic with
W.S. Van Dyke filming
Eskimo (1933) in the early 1930s. They
soon married. They lived 40 years on Beverly Glen, near Westwood
Village in Los Angeles, before moving to Orange County.