Haing Somnang Ngor, born March 22, 1940 in Samrong Yong, Cambodia, is the first Asian American to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In Phom Pehn, he was practicing surgery and gynecology when the Khmer Rouge took control of the city in 1975. He had to hide his medical skills due to the regime's intense hostility toward professionals. He survived three Cambodian prison camps, although he lost his wife and child in childbirth.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, he worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Thailand and traveled to the US with his niece in August 1980. Although he was no actor and had no previous acting experience, he was cast as Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, and won many honors, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
He continued acting in movies and on television. He 1990, he helped organize a foundation to raise funds to care for orphans and help rebuild Cambodia's infrastructure.
Ngor was shot dead outside his home in Los Angeles in February 1996.
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