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.