Biography of Sandra Oh

Sandra Miju Oh (born July 20, 1971) is a Canadian-American actress. She is best known for her starring roles as Rita Wu on the HBO comedy Arliss (1996–2002), Cristina Yang on the ABC medical drama series Grey's Anatomy (2005–2014) and Eve Polastri in the spy thriller series Killing Eve (2018–present). She has received numerous accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and twelve Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

Oh first gained recognition for her roles in the Canadian films Double Happiness (1994) and The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1994). Her later television credits include Judging Amy and American Crime, as well as voice roles on American Dad!, American Dragon: Jake Long, The Proud Family, Phineas and Ferb, Chop Socky Chooks, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Invincible. In 2021, she played the lead role in the Netflix comedy drama series The Chair and was also one of the executive producers of the series.

Oh is known for her standout supporting and leading performances in films such as Bean (1997), Last Night (1998), The Princess Diaries (2001), Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity (2002), Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), Sideways (2004), Wilby Wonderful (2004), Hard Candy (2005), Rabbit Hole (2010), Tammy (2014), Catfight (2016), and Meditation Park (2017), as well as voice roles in Mulan II (2004), Over the Moon (2020), Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) and Turning Red (2022).

Oh won two Genie Awards for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for Last Night and Double Happiness and won a Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series for The Diary of Evelyn Lau.

Oh hosted the 28th Genie Awards in 2008, and became the first woman of Asian descent to host the Golden Globe Awards at the 76th ceremony in 2019. In March 2019, she became the first Asian-Canadian woman to host Saturday Night Live, and was just the third actress of Asian descent to do so, after Lucy Liu in 2000 and Awkwafina in 2018. She was also the first actress of Asian descent to be nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and the first woman of Asian descent to win two Golden Globes. In 2019, Time magazine named Oh one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In addition to her Canadian citizenship, Oh has been a naturalized American citizen since 2018.

Sandra Miju Oh was born in Nepean, Ontario, on July 20, 1971, the daughter of middle-class South Korean immigrants Jeon Young-nam, a biochemist, and Oh Jun-su (John), a businessperson. Her parents had moved to the area in the early 1960s. She has a brother, Ray, and a sister, Grace, and grew up in a Christian household, living on Camwood Crescent in Nepean, where she began acting and practicing ballet at age four to correct her pigeon-toed stance. Growing up, Oh was one of the few youths of Asian descent in Nepean.

At age ten, Oh played The Wizard of Woe in a class musical called The Canada Goose. Later, at Sir Robert Borden High School, she founded the environmental club BASE (Borden Active Students for the Environment), leading a campaign against the use of styrofoam cups. While in high school, she was elected student council president. She also played the flute and continued both her ballet training and acting studies, though she knew that she "was not good enough to be a professional dancer" and eventually focused on acting. She took drama classes, acted in school plays, and joined 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 National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, paying her own way.

Oh told her parents that she would try acting for a few years, and promised to return to university if it failed. Reflecting on forgoing university, she has said that she is "the only person in family who doesn't have a master's in something". Soon after graduating from the National Theatre School in 1993, she starred in a stage production of David Mamet's Oleanna in London, Ontario. Around the same time, she won roles in biographical television films of two significant female Chinese-Canadians: as Vancouver author Evelyn Lau in The Diary of Evelyn Lau, where she won the role over more than 1,000 others who auditioned, and as Adrienne Clarkson in a CBC biopic of Clarkson's life.