Celebrity Biographies
Hiep Thi Le
He began in the cinema at a very young age as the protagonist of “El cielo y la tierra”, his most memorable role, although he has since appeared in various titles. The Vietnamese actress Hiep Thi Le died very young, at the age of 46, on December 19, 2017, suffering from stomach cancer.
Born on November 30, 1971, in Da Nang, at the age of eight she suffered the invasion of China, for which her parents put her and her sister on a fishing boat, to escape the country, in a terrible situation. They both lived in refugee camps in Hong Kong until her father and her older brother were able to join them. Finally the clan moved to the United States, where another year passed until her mother moved with them.
She graduated in Psychology at the University of California, but before she finished some friends told her that a casting was taking place near the campus for Vietnamese-American girls to star in a film. She applied only because she thought it was a fun experience, but was ultimately chosen, out of 16,000 candidates, to star in Heaven and Earth , the climax to Oliver Stone ‘s Vietnamese trilogy , following Platoon and Born on the 4th of July . She played a woman from the Asian country who was having an affair with an American soldier ( Tommy Lee Jones ).
Over the next several years, she played Sarah Michelle Gellar ‘s housekeeper in the teen film Cruel Intentions , and appeared in numerous somewhat second-rate titles. In 2001 she starred in another film about the recent history of her country, Green Dragon , about Vietnamese refugees in the United States, opposite Patrick Swayze and Forest Whitaker .
However, for her the cinema was secondary, since above all she lived from the family restaurant. She is survived by her husband and her two children.