Sandra Oh: Actress In Perpetual (E)Motion

Actress Sandra Oh does not have a perfect face like, say, Gong Li or Joan Chen. You see these women, you can't help but stare, and then you stare some more in the hope that some little flaw will become apparent so your whining about one person having too much of one thing will stop.

Sandra Oh's face is long with eyebrows that aren't delicate and a nose that is not sculpted. It is, however, a most captivating face for the one thing it does: It moves.

Oh's face frowns and sighs and cracks up and worries and guffaws and chortles. It does this on screen, brilliantly at times, and for this, Oh's acting has been revered, garnering her the Canadian equivalent of an Oscar, top prize at Cannes for her work in a video, and the admiration of the Asian community.

Off screen, Oh is wildly engaging. Over the weekend, Oh, in town for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival, bubbled about being recognized by a florist in L.A., and groaned at the memory of her days waitressing. "Ugh. So TERRIBLE! I was the worst waitress. So terrible! I'd forget what everybody ordered. I'd forget the prices, what was on the menu. Ugh!"

Oh was the festival's "Opening Night Feature," the movie-star guest Saturday evening for the local premiere of two of her films: "The Diary of Evelyn Lau" by Sturla Gunnarsson and "Prey," by Helen Lee. The festival, at the Seattle Art Museum, continues through this evening.

Oh, who lives in Los Angeles, arrived in Seattle some six hours before opening night, enough to wander about and visit "that market" and see "this really huge crab" and find this one lapis lazuli-colored peacock feather that was lying about some street.

"Isn't it lovely?" she said, fluttering it, during an interview in which her voice, deep and crisp, darted from one topic to the next, often in mid-sentence, in a manner most appropriate for a woman, 25, who will sit in a chair, then lean forward, then slouch, bury her face, pinch her nose, knit her eyebrows, knead her lips, dig into her purse for an inhaler, then some gum - "Gum?" - finger her gumball-blue eyeglasses, then her hair (brown, three different tones) and, occasionally, snort.

"I was born and bred in Ottawa. A very very normal typical family. Parents were both from South Korea, they came over, got professional jobs, had kids - three - did the suburban thing. One went to the university. (Oh is the middle child) I didn't go . . . "

This is when she gets to the part about telling her parents - who had certain Old World expectations of what would be and what would not be a respectable career - that she wanted to be an actress. She snorts. "They didn't kick me out of the house or anything, but terrible things were said and done. You haven't seen `Double Happiness' have you? You have! It was sort of like that. It was terrible." She shakes her head.

("Double Happiness" for which Oh earned the Canadian Genie for best actress, is about a Chinese Canadian woman whose passion for acting and other things New World clashes with her parent's traditional sensibilities.)

"I first started acting when I was 10. I wanted to be a dancer. Have you ever danced? I wanted to be, but I wasn't good enough."

Oh talks about doing improv in high school, thinking about going into journalism or international relations, then auditioning for the National Theater School of Canada.

"My parents now, of course, are thrilled. My dad, he wants to manage my career. But then, my mom, when I was at the National Theater School, she would say things like, `Sandy. You live by the University of Toronto. Why don't you take a class?' "

What turned Oh's parents around, she explains, was "Evelyn Lau," a film about the Vancouver, B.C., writer who, at age 14, runs away from home to escape an abusive mother. She is raped, becomes a prostitute, gets hooked on drugs. It is a harrowing story that the then 21-year-old Oh portrays superbly.

"I'm in France. I called them (my parents). I said, `I won an award.' They said, `Oh good. That's nice.'

"They saw a tape of (the movie). My dad, it really grabbed him. My mom, she said to me, `How did you go through that?' She was very empathetic. She said, `Oh, I see what you're doing.' It was validation."

On why she acts, Oh says: "Wasn't it Laurence Olivier who said, `Love me! Love me! Love me!' A lot of times, I think, this is the only thing I know how to do." Then she talks about her dreadful days waitressing.

Oh is working on a movie based on the BBC series "Mr. Bean" and will be seen for a second season next year on HBO, in the series "Arli$$."

TV is a grind, she says, but she'd much rather be doing cable than mainstream. On diversity in TV these days, she quips. "TV today, is so, so . . . There's WB and there's UPN. It's kind of like, these are the black networks. Everything else is white: ABC, CBS, NBC.

"If I were one of the `Friends,' I don't think I'd want to be known for that. I don't think it'd be artistically satisfying. There's some great TV - `Homicide.' If I could do `Homicide' I'd do it like that.

"And I'd do `The Simpsons.' "

Film-festival organizers hoped Oh would draw a big crowd Saturday night, and she did: Nearly every seat in the 300-seat audience was full.

Such recognition, Oh says, can be overwhelming. "I still feel strange, being asked to participate on panels, to emcee things. I think, why me? Why not get someone else?"

Then Oh talks about this Vietnamese girl who wrote her a fan letter about wanting to be like her one day.

"If they can see someone on screen, who looks like them, expressing themselves, being vibrant in a way they want to be . . . well, then that's the best thing in the world."