Modest life for star

Press, 15 May 1985, Page 19

Modest life for star

NZPA-AP Los Angeles In spite of an Academy Award for “The Killing Fields,” Dr Haing Ngor continues to work for SUS4OO (5NZ884) a week counselling refugees at the Chinatown Service Centre. Ngor, aged 36, has no beach house in Malibu or mansion in Bel-Air. The physician, who speaks nine languages, maintains a modest apartment on the edge of Chinatown, near his work at the centre, which provides social services, job

training and placement for about 30,000 Chinese and Indo-Chinese each year. On a shelf beside his

French-English dictionary, there is a paperback copy of “The Killing Fields,” the factually based story of an American reporter and his Kampuchean assistant during the fall of Cambodia (now Kampuchea) in 1975. In “The Killing Fields” Ngor portrayed Dith Pran, the assistant who was forced into slave labour in the fields with millions of other Kampucheans. Ngor’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge were similar to Pran’s. Both escaped into Thailand. All that remains of Ngor’s family is a younger brother, who lives in Van Nuys, and two nieces. Ngor said he got the film role by accident. “I tell you, the movie business in Cambodia is very low class people,” he said. “Doctors are like pretty high.” But the casting director was at a wedding Ngor attended and after several interviews and an offer of JUSI3OO (JNZ2B73) a week, Ngor agreed. Still, he said, he only learned the extent of his part when he arrived in Thailand with the filmmakers in 1983. “They said, Haing, you play this part, and I said, ‘Oh, my God.’”