Sandra Oh

She has received several awards including one Primetime Emmy Award from 14 nominations, as well as two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2019, Time magazine named Oh one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Oh first gained recognition for her roles in the Canadian films Double Happiness (1994) and The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1994), where she won Genie Awards for both films. 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. She has had notable leading performances in films such as Last Night (1998), Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity (2002), Wilby Wonderful (2004), Catfight (2016), Meditation Park (2017), and Quiz Lady (2023). She has also taken supporting roles in Bean (1997), The Princess Diaries (2001), Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), Sideways (2004), Hard Candy (2005), Rabbit Hole (2010), and Tammy (2014). She voiced roles in the animated films Mulan II (2004), Over the Moon (2020), Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) and Turning Red (2022). She 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 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.

Sandra Oh studied at National Theatre, Sir Robert Borden High School and The Royal Conservatory of Music. The recorded working language is English. Works named in the authority record are Grey's Anatomy and Killing Eve. Distinctions recorded are Theatre World Award, Canada's Walk of Fame, Governor General's Performing Arts Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.

Sandra Miju Oh was born in Nepean, Ontario, on July 20, 1971, to middle-class South Korean immigrants Oh 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 practicing ballet at age four to correct her pigeon toed stance. She took up acting at the age of 10. 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 [her] family who doesn't have a master's in something". Oh would later receive an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College and deliver the commencement address in 2025. 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.

Oh came to prominence in her home country for her lead performance in the Canadian film Double Happiness (1994), playing Jade Li, a twenty-something Chinese-Canadian woman negotiating her wishes and those of her parents. The film received critical acclaim, with Roger Ebert praising Oh's "warm performance". Janet Maslin of The New York Times also praised her performance, saying: "Ms. Oh's performance makes Jade a smart, spiky heroine you won't soon forget." Oh won the Genie Award for Best Actress for the role. In 1995 she appeared in the Canadian film Little Criminals with a multi-scene, but uncredited, performance. In 1997, she appeared in the film Bean, playing the supporting role of Bernice, the art gallery PR manager. Her other Canadian films include Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity and Last Night (1998), for which she again won a Best Actress Genie. She was cast in the drama Dancing at the Blue Iguana (2000), playing a stripper at a gentlemen's club opposite Daryl Hannah. The film received mediocre reviews, though Oh was praised for her performance. The New York Times review said, "Oh make[s] the most of [her] opportunity to explore the vulnerability below [her] characters' hard-edged surface." The same year, she appeared in the drama Waking the Dead. In 2002, Oh appeared in the family comedy Big Fat Liar, followed by a minor role in Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal (2002). Oh garnered critical acclaim for her seven seasons as Rita Wu, the assistant to the president of a major sports agency, on the HBO series Arliss, receiving a nomination for an NAACP Image Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and a Cable Ace award for Best Actress in a Comedy for her work. She also made several guest appearances on the series Popular (1999) playing a humanities teacher and guest starred in the television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Judging Amy, Six Feet Under and Odd Job Jack. In theatre, Oh has also starred in the world premieres of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters at the La Jolla Playhouse and Diana Son's Stop Kiss at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York City. In 2003, she was cast in a supporting role opposite Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun, followed by a supporting role in Alexander Payne's drama Sideways (2004). She considers Sideways and The Diary of Evelyn Lau to be the two best films she has made.

In 2005, Oh appeared in several films, including David Slade's thriller Hard Candy; and the independent anthology drama 3 Needles (2005), opposite Chloë Sevigny and Olympia Dukakis, in which she plays a Catholic nun in an AIDS-stricken African village. The same year, Oh was cast as Cristina Yang in the first season of what became the hit ABC medical series Grey's Anatomy. Oh's role on the show earned her both a 2005 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series and a 2006 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. In July 2009, she received her fifth consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for her work on the series. In addition to her work on Grey's Anatomy, Oh continued to appear in films. She co-starred in the thriller The Night Listener (2006), alongside Robin Williams and Toni Collette; in the superhero comedy Defendor (2009); Ramona and Beezus (2010); and in the critically acclaimed drama Rabbit Hole (2010), opposite Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. In her only audiobook, she played Brigid O'Shaughnessy in a Grammy-nominated dramatization of The Maltese Falcon (2008), which also featured Michael Madsen and Edward Herrmann. She also has done a few voice roles in animation, including a few guest appearances in American Dragon: Jake Long, the voice of Princess Ting-Ting in Mulan II, and the voice of Doofah in The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends. Oh was the host of the 28th Genie Awards on March 3, 2008. In 2009, Oh performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. During the off-season hiatus from filming Grey's Anatomy in 2010, Oh took the part of Sarah Chen in the British crime drama, Thorne. She undertook intensive dialect coaching in order to play her British character. On June 28, 2011, it was announced that Oh would receive a star on Canada's Walk of Fame; she was inducted on October 1 at Elgin Theatre in Toronto. In 2013, Oh formally announced that she would be leaving Grey's Anatomy at the end of the tenth season. Oh exited the series with the season 10 finale.

Oh was in a relationship with filmmaker Alexander Payne for five years. They married in January 2003, separated in early 2005, and divorced in late 2006. On July 8, 2013, Oh received the key to the city of Ottawa from Mayor Jim Watson. Oh practices Vipassanā, a Buddhist form of meditation. Her work in acting is informed by a loose creative collective that teaches "creative dream work", which reportedly fuses Jungian dream analysis with method acting and aims to bring one's "subconscious work into consciousness". Oh became a US citizen in 2018. On the first anniversary of her citizenship, she discussed it while hosting Saturday Night Live and referred to herself as an "Asian-Canadian-American". Oh was awarded the National Arts Centre Award from the Governor General of Canada in 2019, as a part of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards. In June 2022, Oh was named an officer of the Order of Canada. Later in that year, she was one of a number of recent inductees to the Order to be included in the Canadian delegation to the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II.

On March 22, 2021, Oh gave a speech at a Stop Asian Hate rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in response to the Atlanta spa shootings. She encouraged people "to reach out to the Asian American community", stating that they were "very scared". I'm gonna be very, very brief, but one thing I know, many of us in our community are very scared, and I understand that, and one way to try to kind of go through– get through our fear is to reach out to our communities.....I will challenge everyone here: if you see something, will you help me? If you see one of our brothers and sisters in need, will you help us?...I am proud to be Asian! I wanna hear you say, I am proud to be Asian! I belong here! I am proud to be Asian! I belong here! Many of us don't get the chance to be able to say that, so I just wanted to give us an opportunity to be able to shout that.