This year's Oscar nominations have brought recognition to numerous film artists of Asian descent. If any of them win (it's Michelle Yeoh's time, surely?), they'll join a small, distinguished coterie. The Academy Awards' history of winners of Asian descent goes back many decades, and while you may recognize recent names like Ang Lee and Bong Joon-ho, you may not know the stories of those who came long before.
Here are five remarkable winners, all of whose work lives on.
James Wong Howe (1899-1976)
Academy Award-winning cinematographer for "Hud" (1964) and "The Rose Tattoo" (1956), also nominated for "Algiers," "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," "Kings Row," "The North Star," "Air Force," "The Old Man and the Sea," "Seconds," "Funny Lady."
One of Hollywood's greatest cinematographers, James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899 and immigrated with his family as a very small child, growing up in Pasco, Washington. Making his way to Los Angeles as a teen, he found work as a slate-holder at Lasky Studios, where Cecil B. DeMille befriended him and made him an assistant cameraman. His cinematography work began with silent films in the 1920s and continued for five decades, with his credits including such classics as "The Thin Man," "The Prisoner of Zenda," "Sweet Smell of Success," "Bell, Book and Candle" and many more.
Fascinated by cameras since childhood, Howe was an innovator: His big break came when he figured how to make silent star Mary Miles Minter's blue eyes shine (by draping his camera in black velvet to block out extra light) in still photos. She began requesting him on her films, and a career was born. Howe was an early user of aerial shots (in 1955's "Picnic") and was a pioneer of low-key lighting, a moody style that accentuates shadows and contrast. (He was known in the studios as "Low Key Howe.") As one of very few Asian artists working in midcentury Hollywood, Howe faced discrimination throughout his career, and for many years was unable to attain American citizenship due to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And yet he persevered, often making multiple films per year, all with his trademark flair. Howe's remarkable career ended with 1975's "Funny Lady," during the filming of which he collapsed from illness; he died the following year, at 76. The New York Times, covering a retrospective of Howe's films last year, wrote, "There are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema's transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form."
Miyoshi Umeki (1929-2007)
Academy Award for best supporting actress for "Sayonara" in 1957
The first performer of Asian descent to win an Academy Award for acting, Umeki was born in Otaru, Japan, and began her career as a nightclub singer during World War II. Making her way to New York in the mid-1950s, she quickly got a record contract and a regular spot on the TV variety show "Arthur Godfrey and His Friends." That show, according to her New York Times obituary, was what led to "Sayonara," her first film role, in which she played the Japanese wife of an American airman (Red Buttons, who also won an Oscar for his role). A Tony Award-nominated stage actor for the musical "Flower Drum Song" (she reprised her role in the 1961 movie), she later moved into working in television, and was known to a generation as Mrs. Livingston, the housekeeper on the 1969-72 TV series "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."
After the series ended its run, Umeki retired from performing; her son said she wanted to focus on being a wife and mother. But there may have been another reason: a frustration with constantly being offered roles that fed into a stereotype of Japanese women: shy, sweet, doll-like. Interviewed about her career, her son Michael Hood told Entertainment Weekly that he once asked her why she would agree to do roles in pidgin English. "Her answer was very simple: 'I didn't like doing it, but when someone pays you to do a job, you do the job, and you do your best.'" In the mid-'70s, Hood said, she etched out her name on her Oscar statuette and threw it away.
Haing S. Ngor (1940-1996)
Academy Award for best supporting actor, "The Killing Fields" (1985)
Haing S. Ngor never intended to be an actor, but in a too-brief life filled with hardship, the profession nonetheless found him. An obstetrician/gynecologist in his native Cambodia, he and his wife were imprisoned and tortured by the Khmer Rouge rebels who had violently taken over the government in 1975. Forced to work in labor camps, he endured four hellish years before making a harrowing escape to Thailand with his orphaned niece in 1979 and immigrating to the U.S. in 1980, where he initially worked as a security guard in Los Angeles. At a party, he met a casting director for the movie "The Killing Fields," who urged him to read for the role of real-life Cambodian photojournalist and refugee Dith Pran, whose life story had many similarities with Ngor's own. Initially reluctant, he finally agreed to take on the role, hoping it would bring attention to what had happened in his country.
After winning the Oscar for "The Killing Fields" (he was the first Asian actor to win the category, and the first nonprofessional to win an acting award since the 1940s), Ngor went on to appear in a number of other films and television episodes in the 1980s and '90s. His Washington Post obituary notes that he lived modestly in a small apartment while spending most of his time and money helping other refugees who had survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and often returned to the Thai-Cambodian border where he had helped to open a medical training center. On Feb. 25, 1996, Ngor was shot to death outside his home in Los Angeles. Though there was speculation that Ngor's killing was politically motivated, three teenage gang members were tried and convicted of the crime.
His niece, Sophia Demetri, told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016, "He used his fame to educate people, and today, every time people see his Oscar, they ask me about Cambodia, and then his legacy goes on."
Bhanu Athaiya (1929-2020)
Academy Award for best costume design, "Gandhi" (1983), shared with John Mollo
The first person from India to win an Oscar, Athaiya began her career as a painter, magazine illustrator and a fashion designer for a Bombay (now Mumbai) boutique, where her work caught the eye of the busy Bollywood movie industry. "Top stars started approaching me on their own and recommending me to filmmakers," she told The Indian Express in an interview the year before her death in 2020. "I never had to go knocking on doors." Designing her first film — a Bollywood musical, of course — in 1956, she went on to design costumes for more than 100 films.
"Gandhi," directed by Richard Attenborough, was an enormous undertaking: a three-hour period epic, including crowd scenes that required thousands of appropriately dressed extras. But Athaiya was undaunted. "[Attenborough] was making a complex film and needed someone who knew India inside out," Athaiya said, in an interview quoted in her New York Times obituary. "So much had to be contributed, and I was ready for it." A staple of Bollywood film, she continued to work into her 70s and 80s; among her later credits was the Academy Award-nominated 2001 sports drama "Lagaan," then the most expensive Indian film of all time. Athaiya died in Mumbai of a brain tumor, at the age of 91.
Richard Chew (1940-)
Academy Award for film editing, "Star Wars" (1978; shared with Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lewis), also nominated for editing "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
Though Richard Chew, born in Los Angeles to Chinese immigrant parents, attended Harvard Law School, movie fans can be grateful that the law didn't work out for him: Chew went on to edit some hugely popular and acclaimed films of the '70s, '80s and later, including "The Conversation," "My Favorite Year," "Risky Business," "Waiting to Exhale," "Shanghai Noon" and "Singles." But "Star Wars," for which he was the first person of Asian descent to win in the film editing category, is the one everyone asks him about. "It was a walk in the dark, really," he told the Hollywood Reporter in a 2022 interview about his career. "I remember after one screening, we were looking at a couple of reels that included the robots. I'm a much more literal guy than George [Lucas], and George has this fantastic mind. After the screening, I remember making some crack to George, like, 'Well, you know, if it doesn't work out, you could also market some toys based on what these guys look like.'"
Chew, whose latest film was 2019's "I'll Find You," was given the career achievement award by American Cinema Editors in 2022.
