At a recent fundraiser for Japan we were able to spend time chatting with Kieu Chinh. You can imagine how honored we were to not only be graced with her presence, but offered a seat at her table.
She is a towering figure in both the Vietnamese and Hollywood film industries with an acting career that stretches back to Vietnam in 1957 and continued in Hollywood after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and still continues today. Her resume is filled with over 100 TV and film roles and a career working with a host of Hollywood stars that dates back to a role in an American movie filmed in Southeast Asia along side Burt Reynolds in 1964. Her performances have won her awards and accolades from her peers and even with all this history and iconic status she remains a gracious and humble person.
She invited us to the home that she designed and built to conduct our interview which in and of itself was an amazing experience we are happy to share with readers. Mixing the comfort of a contemporary home with memories of Vietnam both inside and outside her home, she has created a beautiful oasis that was the perfect backdrop for an interview.
We talked about the tragedies of war that affected so much of her life and family; how she was discovered by an American director in Vietnam; her Vietnamese film career that came to a crashing end when she left Vietnam in 1975; and the reinvention of herself as an American actress. There is no way to give such a towering figure in the film industry five minutes on camera and so we won’t…in fact, we will be rolling out multiple posts starting with our tour of her home while she shared memories of her past as a Vietnamese woman, as an actress in both Vietnam and Hollywood and as a humanitarian. Our film editor, Eric Chenjie Pan, was not satisfied to do the usual beautiful editing readers have become familiar with, so to give such an amazing artist something more, we developed an introduction to Kieu to introduce the interview segments that we hope is as beautiful as the actress herself. Thank you Kieu.
Photographed and Edited by Eric Chenjie Pan
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