胡蝶
Chen made her film debut at age 13, playing a minor role in the film "Song Bai Yuan" () made by the film division of the Commercial Press in Shanghai. At age 15 she enrolled at the actress training school of the Laughter Stage, a theatre run by Runje Shaw (Shao Zuiweng), her future husband. In 1926 she joined Tianyi, the film studio recently founded by Shaw, and was selected by Shaw to play the starring role of Qiu Xiang in the film "The Flirting Scholar" (). The film was not a great success, and Chen remained a secondary star of Tianyi after Hu Die (Butterfly Wu) and Wu Suxin ().