When Joseph L. Mankiewicz was in Saigon to shoot The Quiet American in 1958, he discovered a Vietnamese girl walking down the street and offered her a small role in the movie because she was tall and could speak English and French. Kieu Chinh had to ask her in-laws for permission to take the job, which they refused. (The part went to Italian actress Giorgia Moll.) Undeterred, Chinh went on to make a name for herself as one of Vietnam’s most distinguished actors, starting with The Bells of Thien Mu Temple in 1957, and going on to make 20 more in Vietnam and all over S. E. Asia. She acted in a couple of American movies during the 1960s as well, including A Yank in Viet-Nam in 1964 and Operation CIA in 1965 opposite Burt Reynolds. She hosted her own television talk show as well, interviewing local and Hollywood celebrities until she fled Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The story of Chinh’s life is possibly more interesting than the movies she’s made. When she was 6 years old in 1943, she lost her mother and baby brother in a hospital bombing by Allied forces in Hanoi. When she was 15, she and her father planned to leave N. Vietnam for Saigon, but he left her at the airport to go without him. He had been a minister in the French colonial government and lost everything in the war, so he decided to stay and search for his oldest son who had joined the Communist forces. He ended up in jail for seven years until he died of poverty when he got out. Chinh never saw him again.

She married at 18, had 3 children in Saigon, and started a thriving acting career. Then in 1975, while she was shooting a film in Singapore, she decided to flee to Canada where her children were in boarding school before Saigon was occupied by North Vietnam forces. Chinh talks in an oral history video for Viet Diaspora Stories about how she worked on a chicken farm for minimum wage, and how she spent her last few dollars to call her Hollywood connections for help to get to the US. She called William Holden who she had met at film festivals in Hong Kong; Burt Reynolds, her co-star; Glenn Ford who had appeared on her talk show. She couldn’t reach any of them. In desperation, she called Tippi Hedren who she had also met through her talk show when Hedren was doing a USO tour in Vietnam. Hedren came through, sponsoring her, and later her children, to the US. And it was Hedren who took her to the premiere party of Jaws where a producer of the TV show M*A*S*H saw her and gave her her first job on that show. She played Hawkeye’s S. Korean love interest in the episode In Love and War, which Alan Alda wrote and directed.

Chinh’s career flourished in the US. She appeared in 45 feature films and television shows, among them the TV movies The Children of An Lac (1980), The Letter (1982) and The Girl Who Spelled Freedom (1986), and films like Hamburger Hill (1987), Gleaming the Cube (1988), Riot (1997) and Catfish in Black Bean Sauce (1999). She also landed a recurring role on ABC’s Vietnam war series China Beach from 1989 to 1991 and the Fox TV show 21 in 2008.

But her best-known role is that of Suyuan Woo in Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club in 1993, a film about the relationship between Chinese immigrant mothers and their Chinese-American mothers. (One of Chinh’s co-stars in the film is HFPA member and celebrated Chinese actress Lisa Lu.)

In 1996, a documentary about her return to Saigon to reunite with her brother after 41 years and visit her father’s grave called Kieu Chinh: A Journey Home won an Emmy. She told the Los Angeles Times before she left on her trip: “All I want to do is hug my brother, look at him and hear his voice. I last saw him when he was a young man, and now he is an old man. I know on the other side of the ocean my brother has the same feelings about me.”

Chinh and Terry Anderson, a journalist who was held hostage in Lebanon for seven years, co-founded the Vietnam Children’s Fund which sets up schools and educates children in Vietnam.

Amongst the accolades that Chinh has received in her six-decade career are the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Vietnamese International Film Festival in 2003, the Special Acting Award at the Women’s Film Festival in Turin in 2003, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the San Diego Asian Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Fest in 2006 and 2015, respectively. In 2009, Chinh was honored as the Woman of the Year for her work in film and community service by California Representative Lou Correa.

She lives in Garden Grove, California.