Rosalind Chao


Rosalind Chao is an American actress. Chao's best-known roles have been Soon-Lee Klinger in the mid-1980s CBS show AfterMASH, Rose Hsu Jordan in the 1993 movie The Joy Luck Club, the recurring character Keiko O'Brien on ' and ' in the 1990s, and Dr. Kim on The O.C. in 2003.

Early life

Chao's parents ran a successful pancake restaurant, Chao's, across the street from Disneyland, and employed her there from an early age. She attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, graduating in 1978.

Career

For some time, Chao worked at Disneyland as an international tour guide.
Chao's parents were instrumental in her decision to pursue acting; she began at the age of five in a California-based Peking opera traveling company at the instigation of her parents who were already heavily involved, and during the summers they sent her to Taiwan to further develop her acting skills.
As a child she played the daughter of a laundry owner on the 1970 episode of Here's Lucy entitled "Lucy the Laundress".
Deciding not to pursue acting, Chao enrolled in the communications department at the University of Southern California where she earned her degree in journalism. However, after spending a year as a radio newswriting intern at the CBS-owned Hollywood radio station KNX, she soon returned to acting.
Her big break was with the role of Soon-Lee, a South Korean refugee, in the final episodes of the TV series M*A*S*H. Soon-Lee married longtime starring character Maxwell Klinger in the series finale "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen", the most-watched sitcom television episode of all time. Chao continued playing the character in the M*A*S*H sequel: 1983's AfterMASH, her first role billed at co-starring status.
Chao regularly portrayed the Japanese exo-botanist Keiko Ishikawa O'Brien on both ' and ' with eight appearances in the former and nineteen in the latter before DS9's end in 1999. In 2010, a preliminary casting memo for The Next Generation from 1987 was published, revealing that Chao was originally considered for the part of Enterprise security chief Tasha Yar.
In August 2018, Chao joined the upcoming live-action retelling of Mulan. In 2019, Chao was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences citing her contributions to critically acclaimed films The Joy Luck Club and I Am Sam.

Personal life

While doing theatre at the Mark Taper Forum, Chao met Simon Templeman; the couple would eventually wed. They have two children, a son and a daughter.

Filmography

Television

Film

Theatre

2018The Great Wave at The National Theatre of Great BritainEtsuko
2008Some GirlLindsay