Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (film) later inspired a television soap opera in 1967, though without the hyphen in the show's title. A widowed Eurasian doctor Han Suyin (Jones) falls in love with a married-but-separated American correspondent Mark Elliott (Holden) in Hong Kong, during the period of China's Civil War in the late 1940s. Although they briefly find happiness together, she is ostracized by the greater Chinese community. After losing her position at the hospital, Suyin and her adopted daughter go to live with a friend while Mark is on an assignment during the Korean War. They write to each other constantly. She receives word Mark
Laura Donnelly (Love Is a Many Splendored Thing) the convent and discovered what she wanted from life. She began to see her sister Iris's former fiancé, Mark Elliott, a successful architect in San Francisco. This was good for her, since Mark's stuffy mother, Helen Elliott Donnelly, liked her more than Iris. In a complete irony, Helen would become Laura's sister in-law, as well as her mother in-law, after she married Tom Donnelly, Laura and Iris' older brother, a police officer on the San Francisco Police Department. The two were married and began their lives together. Despite that, Iris was never far from Mark's mind, to the insecure Laura's