Sandra Oh

Sandra Miju Oh was born on July 20, 1971 in Nepean, Ontario, Canada, but her oriental features give her away, her parents are from Seoul, South Korea. She has studied dance and drama at the Montreal Theater School. Her debut on stage was in the town of London in Ontario, with a well-known work by David Mamet , “Oleanna”. On Canadian television, she achieved a leading role for which a casting call was held with the participation of 1,000 candidates. She would end up taking the cat into the water and would star in The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1997). That same year she could be seen briefly in Bean, the latest in catastrophic cinema (1997). Shortly after she would have a presence in an important Canadian film, The Red Violin, where this instrument and music have enormous importance. Thus he will add secondary roles, sometimes of little interest. Sometimes she is chosen for a commercial title, such as A Surprise Princess (2001) and Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), but it is decidedly not easy in the WASP world to give protagonist channel to her peculiar ethnicity.

Anyway, some “authors” see something to recruit her in their films. Steven Soderbergh counts on her for Full Frontal (2002), and the same for Alexander Payne (2004) with Sideways , her most important film, although her presence is clearly secondary. The actress had married Payne in early 2003, but the marriage formalized their divorce at the end of 2006. Oh’s other prestigious titles are Wilby Wonderful (2004), the unhealthy  Hard Candy (2005) and 3 Needles (2005), a look at the drama of those affected by AIDS.

It is clear that she owes her popularity to Dr. Cristina Yang from the Grey’s Anatomy series , not for nothing she has been in the eight seasons of the series since it started in 2005. Her exotic face combines it with a hardness and coldness, where she can also mischief and cynicism must be present, an explosive combination of attitudes that have helped to give complexity to his most emblematic character.

TV leaves less time for movies, but Oh is smart, and gets some interesting jobs that don’t require a lead role. So it coincides with Robin Williams and Toni Collette in Voices at night (2006), in the dumpy superhero movie Defendor (2009), in the family comedy Ramona and her sister (2020) and in the interesting drama about a marriage that has lost his son Rabbit Hole (2010).

It’s not easy for Oh to land a leading role in the movies, but he shouldn’t despair, he has more than enough talent.