Kieu Chinh [p.2]

NHA: Did you have any formal acting training?

KC: No, I didn’t. Not at all. Like I said, I never thought I’d become an actress. Actually, I studied piano since I was very young and I was dreaming about music. I love music. I went to French Catholic school and I learned piano from the nuns there.

NHA: You are the most well-known actress from Viet Nam with an established acting career before 1975. Can you tell us about some of the highlights from your acting days in Viet Nam?

KC: I think it was the moment I became a producer. And the first movie I produced was Nguoi Tình Khong Chan Dung. That was the only movie that had the presence of all the South Vieät Nam military branches. I’m very proud of that production...My production company was called Giao-Chi. Giao-Chi is the original name of Vietnamese, before we called ourselves Vietnamese we called ourselves “nguoi Giao-Chi”. At that time I also had a TV talk show on and off and I worked a lot in Southeast Asia...[ Nguoi Tình Khong Chan Dung] was the most successful feature film to come out of South Vieät Nam in 1973.

NHA: I hear that Nguoi Tình Khong Chan Dung has been remade recently.

KC: Yes, recently. I heard that there were many pirated copies of the movie out there and that hurts the quality of the movie, so I cooperated with Trung Tam Asia to make a new copy for DVD. Luckily that negative was kept in Tokyo, Japan so we brought it here and cleaned it up with the new technology. It looks even better than before.

NHA: Like other Vietnamese refugees you’ve been through great hardships, having been twice displaced, first from your home in the North in 1954 and then from Viet Nam in 1975. You had to start all over with nothing when you came to the United States. What motivated you to keep pursuing your acting career once you came here?

KC: Yes, it is true. I have been a refugee twice in my life. I left North Viet Nam in 1954 when I was very young. I lost my whole family. And then again when I was at the peak of my career as an actress and film producer. You know, in my time, a woman becoming a film producer was not ordinary.

I left South Viet Nam in the very last days of 1975 with nothing but the clothes on my back. I lost everything. My children were in Canada at the time. I left home by myself and I ended up in Singapore in jail because when I landed in Singapore the government said that my passport belonged to a government that was no longer in power so they put me in jail. Fortunately I had friends in the motion picture industry who helped me get out. I went from Singapore to Thailand to Hong Kong to Korea to Japan to France. From France to London to America, and from America to Canada. At the time there was a world regulation that wherever we [Vietnamese] landed, we automatically became a refugee of that country. When the Canadian government sent me out for work, they asked me what my profession was and I told them acting. They said “We do not provide jobs for actors here.”

I knew the only place I could go back to my acting career was Hollywood. I was very lucky that I knew some people in Hollywood. With my last dollar I called someone that I had met only once when she was a guest on my talk show in 1965. Her name was Tippi Hedren [a star best known for her roles in Hitchcock films and the mother of Melanie Griffith]. She sent me an airplane ticket. She brought me here. I stayed with her. At that time she volunteered to help Indochinese refugees. She was vice-chair for Food for the Hungry, the group that sponsored 5,000 refugees in a camp called Hope Village in Sacramento. I stayed there for days helping Tippi to help my own people. I helped [the refugee families] fill out forms, translated for them, served food, provided warm clothes. Then I went back to stay with Tippi until she helped me bring my children over from Canada.

NHA: So once you settled in, how did you get your start acting in America? What was it like in the beginning, especially trying to adjust to a new society?