Profile of Haing S. Ngor on Famous Like Me

Dr. Haing S. Ngor (Traditional Chinese: 吳漢) (March 22, 1940 – February 25, 1996) was a Cambodian American physician and actor who is best known for winning a 1985 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the movie The Killing Fields, in which he portrayed journalist and refugee Dith Pran in 1970s Cambodia, under the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

Ngor himself lived through the Cambodian holocaust, and survived by hiding the fact that he was an obstetrician and gynecologist. As an educated person and a professional, he would have been killed under the harsh regime and purges of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. After the collapse of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Ngor worked as a doctor in a refugee camp inside Thailand, and left for the United States on August 30, 1980.

In 1988, he wrote Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey, detailing his life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In the second edition Survival in the Killing Fields, Roger Warner, Ngor's co-author, adds an epilogue telling the story of Ngor's life after winning the Academy Award.

On February 25, 1996, Ngor was shot to death outside his apartment in Los Angeles, California, by members of a street gang who demanded the locket around his neck. The locket contained a picture of his late wife; none of the money in his wallet (reportedly a few hundred dollars in cash) was stolen. There was some speculation at the time that the gang members were acting at the behest of Khmer Rouge sympathizers in the U.S., but this was never proven.

Three 19-year-old members of the Oriental Lazy Boyz street gang were arrested and charged with Ngor's murder. They were separately tried and convicted in the Superior Court of Los Angeles. Tak Sun Tan was sentenced to 56 years to life; Indra Lim to 26 years to life; Jason Chan to life without parole. Tak Sun Tan's conviction was reversed in 1998 by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, which found that prosecutors had manipulated the jury's sympathy by describing Ngor's hardships on the killing fields, but this decision was reversed and the conviction was ultimately upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in July 2005.

Ngor survived incredible dangers during his life in Cambodia only to die violently in his adopted homeland, but he told a New York Times reporter after the release of The Killing Fields, "If I die from now on, OK! This film will go on for a hundred years."

Further Reading

• Haing Ngor with Roger Warner, A Cambodian Odyssey, Macmillian Publishing Company, 1987. (ISBN 0025893300).
• Haing Ngor with Roger Warner, Survival in the Killing Fields, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003; 515 pp. (ISBN 078613151).

External Links

• Yahoo! Biography
• CNN story on his death
• Dr. Haing S. Ngor at the Internet Movie Database

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