In the days when Dr. Haing S. Ngor was a medical student here, he looked down on acting as a low-class profession.
It took a tragedy for Ngor, who has a featured part in Oliver Stone's new Vietnam movie, "Heaven and Earth," to change his mind.Up to a million people died of starvation, overwork and execution after the 1975 takeover of Cambodia by the communist Khmer Rouge. The radical group sought to purge the country of all Western and bourgeois influence, and started by targeting virtually all educated Cambodians for elimination.
The tragedy was chronicled in 1984 movie "The Killing Fields," in which Ngor played a Cambodian news assistant for The New York Times. He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Dith Pran, whose survival story was not unlike his own.
Ngor never took acting lessons but said during a recent interview that he was given on-the-spot, life-or-death training during the 31/2 years the Khmer Rouge was in power.
Thrusting the remaining stub of his right pinkie finger in the air, Ngor said the Khmer Rouge cut half of it off. He lifts his right pant leg to show where they chopped into his ankle with an ax. But he stubbornly refused to admit to them he was the doctor others said he was, thus saving his own life.
Ngor escaped his native land after a Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge, and emigrated to the United States in 1980, his only dream to resume his doctor's work.
But after learning that "The Killing Fields" would chronicle the horrors of the radical Khmer Rouge regime, Ngor decided try his hand at a profession he always had considered beneath him.
Seeing the international attention he, as an actor, was able to bring to his country's horror story changed his mind about the merit of acting and convinced him of the power of filmmaking. He gave up trying to qualify again as a doctor to look for more cinematic opportunities to combat communism, Ngor said.
"Heaven and Earth" gave him his first big chance in years.
The movie tells the story of a Vietnamese woman victimized during the Vietnam War by both the U.S. and South Vietnamese anti-communist forces and the communist Viet Cong, with whom she sympathized. Ngor plays the father of Le Ly Hayslip, on whose life the movie is based.
He said he took the part because the movie "is against communism, and tells the bad about communism. The people don't like the communist regime."
Ngor's character commits suicide toward the end of the movie because he is accused by the pro-American side of supporting the communists and by the communists of supporting the "imperialists" and sees no way out.
If the 46-year-old Ngor is convincing in the suicide scene, it might be because he has experienced the same emotions in his real life.
When the scene was filmed, Ngor said he felt like he was playing his life story: "During the Khmer Rouge time, I try and I want to kill myself, too."
Ngor said that despite his ability to relate to his character, he could have played him better had Stone been less commanding and more friendly. "He's a little bit difficult to work with. He is a very powerful director, not very friendly to you.
"The whole crew and actors in the movie complained all the time. I'm not saying (he's) the world's worst, but very difficult to work with."
"Heaven and Earth," which opened in wide release on Jan. 7, is one of three movies in which Ngor appears this year, the busiest of his screen career.
He also plays a doctor who prolongs and improves Michael Keaton's life with Nicole Kidman before Keaton dies of cancer in the recently released "My Life."