Steven Otfinoski - Sandra Oh

Sandra Oh and her parents at the 60th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards

Source: Newscom.

Sandra attended Sir Robert Borden High School. She excelled at academics and extracurricular activities. Sandra played the flute, was elected Student Council president, and founded an environmental club, Borden Active Students for the Environment (BASE) that advocated a halt to the use of Styrofoam cups in school. She joined the drama club and appeared in school plays. With other students she took part in the Canadian Improv Games and honed her skills as a comic actress.

"That was a foundation block of my being, I think as an actor," she told Lynn Saxberg in the Ottawa Citizen in 2019. "Ottawa is small.I felt the intimacy of Ottawa was something I could integrate and handle as a young person."

While still in high school, Sandra appeared in television commercial and government training films. She paid for theater school classes by working summer jobs from the age of 14, running day camps for the city and working at a Steak N Burger restaurant. Her first role in a television drama was as a preppy girl in the family TV series Denim Blues in 1989.

Before graduation, Sandra was offered a scholarship in journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa. She turned down the scholarship and instead enrolled in the National Theatre School of Canada (NTSC) in Montreal.

"I really remember that one because getting the acceptance letter from the National Theatre School and having to decide between that and going to university, I was not following a path that was much more comfortable for my parents and my family," she recalled to Saxberg. "But that was not going to be for me. I think that was the very first independent decision I made after high school."

At age 19, while still a student at NTSC, Sandra auditioned for the leading role in Evelyn Lau's Diary (1994), a made-for-TV movie adapted from the diaries of Chinese-Canadian author Lau. She showed her gutsy confidence from the moment she walked into the audition, asking for ten minutes to get into the mood for the character. Sandra got the part, winning it over 1,000 other actresses. "She hijacked the part," says director Sturla Gunnarson. "Sandra is able to reach deep down inside herself and project incredible vulnerability, but the reason she's able to do that is that she has a character of steel." In the movie, Sandra's character runs away from home at age 14, gets involved in prostitution and drugs before finding validation for her writing talent when a publisher buys her diaries. For her performance, Sandra was nominated for a Gemini, the Canadian equivalent of the American Emmy Award for excellence in television; and won the Best Actress award at the Cannes International Film Festival in France.

That same year Sandra graduated from NTSC. "It was very difficult for me to tell my parents I was going to become an actor," she told the Canadian Press. "It's not a respected profession in Asian backgrounds." She told Brian Johnson in