Detailed Biography

Sandra Oh is a Golden Globe and Genie Award winning Canadian actress. She is primarily known for her role as Dr. Cristina Yang in the ABC series Grey's Anatomy. She also played notable roles in the feature films Under the Tuscan Sun and Sideways, and had a supporting role on the HBO original series Arli$$.

Early life

Oh was born in Nepean, Ontario, to middle-class Korean immigrant parents Joon-Soo and Young-Nam, who had come to Canada in the early 1960s. Her father is a businessman and her mother a biochemist Oh grew up living on Camwood Crescent in the Ottawa suburb of Nepean, where she began acting and dancing ballet at an early age.. At the age of 10, she played The Wizard of Woe in a class musical, The Canada Goose.

Later, at Sir Robert Borden High School, she founded the Environmental club BASE , leading a campaign against the use of styrofoam cups. While at Sir Robert Borden High School she was Student Council President. She also played the flute and continued both her ballet training and acting studies; however, she knew that she "was not good enough to be a professional dancer" and eventually focused solely on acting. This interest led her to take drama classes, act in school plays, and join the drama club where she took part in the Canadian Improv Games and Skit Row High, a comedy group. Against her parents' advice, she rejected a four-year journalism scholarship to Carleton University to study drama at the prestigious National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, paying her own way. She told her parents that she would try acting for a few years, and if that failed, return to school . Ironically, while studying at the National Theatre School, she portrayed a waitress in the made-for-television film, School's Out, in which her co-worker, Caitlin Ryan also considers turning down her acceptance into Carleton University's journalism programme.

Soon after graduating from the National Theatre School in 1993, she starred in a London, Ontario stage production of David Mamet's Oleanna. Around the same time, she won roles in biographical TV films of two significant female Chinese-Canadians: as Vancouver author Evelyn Lau in The Diary of Evelyn Lau ; and as Adrienne Clarkson in a CBC biopic of Clarkson's life.

Oh has one brother Ray, and two sisters Grace and Kelly. Ray works as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. Grace works as a Crown attorney in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Career

Oh became even more widely known in Canada for her lead performance in the Canadian film Double Happiness, for which she won the Genie Award for Best Actress. She then went on to star in the 1997 international feature hit film Bean playing the supporting role of Bernice, the art gallery P.R. manager. Her other Canadian films include Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity and Last Night, for which she again won a Best Actress Genie. Sandra Oh at the 2007 Golden Globes

Oh is most familiar to American audiences from her roles in the films Under the Tuscan Sun and Sideways. She considers Sideways to be one of the two best movies she has made, along with Evelyn Lau. In the less well-known Dancing at the Blue Iguana, she played a poetry-writing stripper, performed several nude dance routines and received the movie's best reviews. On American television, she is renowned for her current role in the hit ABC medical series Grey's Anatomy, for which she has won both a 2005 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series and a 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. In July 2009, she received her fifth consecutive Emmy nomination for her work on the series.

Oh received critical acclaim for her six seasons as Rita Wu on the HBO series Arli$$. She received an NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and a Cable Ace award for Best Actress in a Comedy for her work on Arli$$. In theatre, Oh has also starred in the world premieres of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters at the La Jolla Playhouse and Diana Son's Stop Kiss at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre in New York City. She made several guest appearances on the series Popular playing a humanities teacher. She has also guest starred in the television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Judging Amy, American Dragon: Jake Long, Six Feet Under, and Odd Job Jack.

In 2006, she costarred in the film The Night Listener as "Anna," alongside Robin Williams and Toni Collette. In her only audiobook, she played Brigid O'Shaughnessy in a sonic dramatization of The Maltese Falcon , which also featured Michael Madsen and Edward Herrmann.

Although Oh remains active in feature films, the critically acclaimed Grey's Anatomy remains her primary current occupation.

Oh was host of the 28th Genie Awards on March 3, 2008.

Personal life

Oh and Sideways filmmaker Alexander Payne were in a relationship for five years. They married on January 1, 2003, separated in early 2005 and divorced in late 2006.