Haing S. Ngor

Haing Somnang Ngor (Khmer: ហាំង សំណាង ង៉ោ; ; March 22, 1940 – February 25, 1996) was a Cambodian-born American actor, gynecologist, and obstetrician. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1985 for his debut performance in the film The Killing Fields (1984), in which he portrayed Cambodian journalist and refugee Dith Pran. Ngor is one of two actors of Asian descent to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the other being Ke Huy Quan in 2023. He survived three terms in Cambodian prison camps, using his medical knowledge to keep himself alive by eating beetles, termites, and scorpions; he eventually crawled between Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese lines to safety in a Red Cross refugee camp. His mother was Khmer and his father was of Hakka Chinese descent. Ngor and Harold Russell are the only two non-professional actors to win an Academy Award in an acting category. Ngor continued acting for the rest of his life, most notably in My Life (1993), portraying spiritual healer Mr. Ho opposite Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. He was murdered in a robbery outside his home in Los Angeles in 1996. Life under the Khmer Rouge Haing Somnang Ngor was born in Samrong Young (in 1940, French Indochina), Bati district, now Takeo province, Cambodia, he trained as a surgeon and gynecologist. He was practicing in the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975 when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized control of the country and proclaimed it Democratic Kampuchea. He was compelled to conceal his education, medical skills, and even the fact that he wore glasses to avoid the new regime's intense hostility to intellectuals and professionals. He was expelled from Phnom Penh along with the bulk of its two million inhabitants as part of the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero" social experiment and imprisoned in a concentration camp along with his wife, My-Huoy, who subsequently died giving birth, along with their unborn child. Although a gynecologist, he was unable to treat his wife, who required a Caesarean section, because he would have been exposed, and both he and his wife (as well as the child) would very probably have been killed. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Ngor worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Thailand and left with his niece for the United States on August 30, 1980. In America, Ngor was unable to resume his medical practice, and he did not remarry.