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Canwest News Service
Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh isn’t just thrilled about being chosen as this year’s anglophone recipient of the National Theatre School’s Gascon-Thomas outstanding achievement award.
She’s also eagerly looking forward to finally treading the boards of the theatre’s Ludger-Duvernay stage to accept it.
"I want to be on that friggin’ stage," she exclaimed during an interview from her home in Los Angeles.
Her graduating class of 1993 had been robbed of a chance to perform in the Monument’s National’s Theatre’s magnificent Ludger-Duvernay Theatre, located in downtown Montreal, because it was undergoing renovations that year.
Oh said she was also looking forward to having her Ottawa-based, Korea-born parents in the audience, and eager to renew bonds with such former classmates as actor/playwright Kristen Thomson, who flew in from Toronto to spend a recent afternoon with her.
Being chosen for the Gascon-Thomas Award has sent Oh, now 38, into retrospective mode. "Thinking of this award, you have to go backwards and think about your life — which I don’t like doing very much," she said. "I can see now that I was born under a bunch of lucky stars. Because when I graduated, what happened to me — the year after I graduated, I did The Diary of Evelyn Lau, I did Double Happiness, and I did this wonderful short film with Adrienne Clarkson."
She played the leads in all three. "That was all luck. I can see now. Then I came to L.A. and I pounded the pavement for 12 years."
Still, she did better than most. "I worked much more in L.A. than I did at home."
But she threw in the towel and moved back to Toronto in early 1996.
Luck struck again, while she was performing in a play at the Factory Theatre. The HBO pilot had been picked up. Oh flew back to L.A. to shoot
Arliss, a series in which she played the secretary of a sports agent. She stayed on permanently in L.A. — in relative anonymity, as far as her home country was concerned.
"I always kind of felt like Canada never knew what I was doing for seven years, because it was on HBO," she said.
The subsequent highlights of her career, appearing in the Academy Award-winning Sideways (2003), and landing the role of Dr. Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy, the following year, are well known.
But there was time in between when she worked quietly in indie films and theatre.
Getting cast in Grey’s Anatomy was beyond lucky. "That’s lightning in a bottle," Oh said.
Sideways, too, was "that kind of wonderful experience, all the way around." And she tosses her time at NTS into the same category. "My class is still so much a part of me in everything I do."
Grey’s Anatomy airs Thursdays on CTV at 6 p.m.
