by Thuy Vo Dang
photos by Benjamin Vu
and courtesy of Kieu Chinh

In pre-1975 Vietnamese cinema, one figure stands out among the rest as accomplished, internationally acclaimed and well-loved. That figure is Kieu Chinh, an actress and producer in South Viet Nam who once again rose to a distinguished place among Asian American actors in Hollywood in the past three decades because of her hard work and perseverance. Her roles have depth and range. She has been acting for almost half a century and continues to grace the silver screen with moving performances. Kieu Chinh describes her acting career the way an artist describes her work: as a labor of love, a continual crafting and re-crafting of one’s skills and passions. It’s a refreshing departure from the paparazzi-induced celebrity craze of American culture where actors more often gain notice for what they’re wearing and who they’re dating than for their craft.

For many Vietnamese Americans who recall the pre-1975 days in South Viet Nam, Kieu Chinh symbolizes the grace and elegance of an era. Before she left Viet Nam during the mass exodus of 1975, she starred in 22 feature-length films in Viet Nam, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan. She founded a production company that produced the popular film, Nguoi Tình Khong Chan Dung, in which she played the lead as a woman who falls in love with a faceless soldier. This film has been re-made and is in circulation in the U.S.

Finding herself displaced from her homeland in 1975, she resolved to build her film career from scratch in the United States. In those days, roles for Asian American actors were very limited. However, Kieu Chinh’s personal motivation to pursue her craft kept her employed, albeit in some minor roles, until the breakthrough film The Joyluck Club where she played the memorable Suyuan, a mother who has to abandon her twin babies in China. Now, in her late 60s and with two films awaiting release (Five Spices and Journey from the Fall), Kieu Chinh shows no signs of slowing down.

I sat down with Kieu Chinh in her Orange County home on a quiet Monday afternoon to talk about her career. Casually dressed in jeans and a shirt with her hair held back in her characteristic neck-grazing bun, Kieu Chinh exuded all the warmth and familiarity of a close family member. We sat in her study where photos, movie stills, and posters mounted on her walls and filling up corners of her bookcases told their own story about her long and impressive career in Viet Nam and the United States.

NHA: Can you tell NHA readers about how your acting career began?

KC: In my time, for my generation, acting was not very welcomed in society and actors were not well-respected so I never thought I would become an actor until 1957. There was a very well-known American director who came to Viet Nam and they were doing a movie called The Quiet American. They saw me walking from the cathedral and went up to me and asked me if I’d be willing to give a screen test for the role of Phuong, the leading lady. They asked me if I spoke the language and I said, yes—English is my third language. At the time I was going to French school. And they said, great, that’s what the character needed. But I had just gotten married and my family didn’t want their daughter-in-law to become an actor so I did not show up at the screen test. My mother-in-law had also asked what kind of character I would be playing. The character falls in love with an Englishman and then later goes out with an American man, so the family wasn’t very enthusiastic about the character. A few months later, Mr. Bui Diem [who was a consultant for The Quiet American] made his first film called Hoi Chuong Thien Mu (The Bell of Thien Mu Pagoda) and he asked me to be the leading lady. And again, my family asked me what kind of character I would be playing and I said a Buddhist nun [laughs] and my mother-in-law said “that’s fine” because she is a Buddhist and [she] went to temple every week...that was in 1957. After that movie I became an actress, and one by one the roles came.