Chong, Rae Dawn

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Rae Dawn Chong

1961—

Actress

Actress Rae Dawn Chong became famous in the 1980s for a string of film roles that maximized her exotic, multiracial looks for the big screen. Of mixed African-American, Native American, Asian, and Anglo ancestry, Chong gained fame in Hollywood at the start of her career as the daughter of popular comedian Tommy Chong. In the 1990s and beyond, her career seemed to falter, though she was occasionally seen as a guest star on such television series as That's So Raven. Chong, however, seemed troubled little by her intermittent time in the limelight, admitting to Paul E. Pratt of Asianweek that "I've never been one to think of my body of work as anything more than 90 minutes of popcorn."

Chong was born in February 28, 1961, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; some sources cite her year of birth as 1962 and the city in which she was born as Vancouver, British Columbia. Her father was of mixed Scottish-Irish and Chinese-Canadian ancestry, and her mother, Maxine, was African-American and Native American and just 17 years old at the time of Rae Dawn's birth. Chong was raised primarily by her father, first in Vancouver and later in Los Angeles, where his career as a nightclub comic eventually segued into a popular comedy duo with Cheech Marin known as Cheech & Chong. The pair's drug-addled comedy routine and stoner characters were a hit with young audiences in the 1970s, and they began appearing in a string of hit movies beginning in 1978 with Up in Smoke.

Child of Hollywood

Chong's family came to include several half-siblings, and her mixed ancestry sometimes caused problems for her in her teens. She was sent to a boarding school in Ojai, California, for a time, and began venturing into the entertainment business herself. She made her television debut in 1974 Disney movie The Whiz Kid and the Mystery at Riverton, and was almost cast in a popular sitcom a few years later, Diff'rent Strokes, as the girlfriend of Willis, one of the two African-American kids being raised by a wealthy white bachelor. Producers of the hit NBC series reconsidered, however, and hired the less-exotic Janet Jackson for the role instead.

Chong made her feature-film debut in Stony Island, a 1978 urban drama set on Chicago's South Side that featured an R&B music-industry storyline and compel- ling soundtrack. Her breakout role, however, came in 1981 with Quest for Fire, a saga of prehistoric man from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud. Its story centered around the Ulam, a community of hunters who do not know how to make fire, but recognize its importance when nature provides the spark for them. The Ulam send out a search party to find a flame and bring it back, and along the way rescue a young girl named Ika (Chong) from death at the hands of cannibals. Ika leads them to her own people, who know the secret of making fire, and along the journey a romance develops between her and one of the Ulam.

Quest for Fire was a large-scale, joint French/Canadian production that was shot in Scotland, Kenya, and Alberta, Canada, and attracted a great deal of media attention when it was released in early 1982. The cast, which included future Beauty and the Beast star Ron Perlman, studied animal behavior for weeks before shooting began, and for their dialogue memorized a script made up entirely of a primitive language created by British novelist Anthony Burgess. The movie's premise that early human civilization was driven by conflicts between Neanderthals and more advanced Homo sapiens was criticized by anthropologists, as was the main point of the plot: that 80,000 years ago primitive man did not yet know how to make fire. Scientists believe that this knowledge dated back some 500,000 years instead. But there was also a great deal of press focused on Chong, who was essentially naked save for some mud stripes throughout the film, and said that she spent nearly 17 weeks like that on location. "It was horrible, cold, dirty work, but the exposure was worth it," she told Deirdre Donahue in People.

A Few Busy Years

Quest for Fire won two César Awards, the French equivalent of the Academy Award, both for best director, and best film. Few of Chong's subsequent projects would fare as well, however. She appeared in the breakdancing drama Beat Street in 1984, put in a well-reviewed performance in another film that same year, Choose Me from Alan Rudolph, and followed it with a role as a lesbian stripper in Fear City and then a pictorial in Playboy. In 1985 she became the center of another minor controversy when Mick Jagger chose her to appear in a 90-minute video for his first solo album, She's the Boss, that featured some graphic love scenes. Publicity of a different type followed that when Chong narrated 20-minute educational film produced for the New York City public schools, The Subject Is AIDS, which was lauded by a long list of prominent public-health officials but mired in legal battles for years because it failed to explicitly endorse abstinence as a way to prevent AIDS. The film, which was shown outside of New York as well, has an alternate title, Sex, Drugs and AIDS.

Fame brought some pitfalls for Chong, she admitted in the 1985 People interview. She married a stockbroker in 1982 and had a son, but the union was short-lived, and she said that substance abuse had marred her first years of success in Hollywood. "I think if it had not been for the birth of my son I'd have gone right over the edge," she told Donahue in People. "It's an old problem in this town." She went on to appear that same year in The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's acclaimed novel, and won a plum role as the sidekick to Arnold Schwarzenegger in another 1985 film, Commando, an action movie that followed on the heels of Schwarzenegger's success as The Terminator. "I knew Arnold would make the film a hit, and I wanted to be part of that," she told People. "I want studio executives and producers to start to say to themselves, ‘Rae Dawn is bankable.’ I am here to make money, but I am also here to make every part I get special."

That box-office clout never happened for Chong, however, perhaps because she was a bit too outspoken about the Hollywood system. "I have to work 20 times harder for a part because I have brown skin, black curly hair and big lips," she asserted in that same interview and added, "I know there are certain actors who won't work with me romantically because I am ethnic." In 1986, she appeared in Running Out of Luck and Soul Man, and later married her co-star from the second movie, C. Thomas Howell. Films that followed included Chaindance and Rude Awakening, both from 1990, Amazon in 1992, and Boca in 1994. Later in the decade she appeared in Goodbye America, Highball, Small Time, and Dangerous Attraction, along other largely ignored films.

At a Glance …

Born February 28, 1961, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; daughter of Tommy Chong (an actor) and Maxine Sneed; married Owen Baylis (a stockbroker), 1982 (divorced); married C. Thomas Howell (an actor), 1989 (divorced, 1990); children: (with Baylis) son Morgan.

Career: Actor, 1974-.

Addresses: Agent—Metropolitan Talent Agency, 4526 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90010.

Scored Well with The Visit

Chong received some long-overdue good reviews with The Visit in 2000, which co-starred her alongside Hill Harper as a young man dying of AIDS in prison after being wrongly convicted of rape. Chong was cast as childhood friend who still visits Alex after surviving her own traumas, including murder and drug addiction. "The initial conversation between Alex and Felicia is one of the funniest and most surprising in the movie," wrote A.O. Scott in a New York Times review. "Her glow of spiritual satisfaction seems downright obnoxious, and he responds by mocking her and questioning her good faith." She followed the film with roles on two short-lived television series, Mysterious Ways and Wild Card.

In 2005, Chong appeared in Constellation with Billy Dee Williams, the story of mixed-race Southern family. She continued to make guest appearances on television, and had a roster of credits that ranged from Melrose Place to Judging Amy, but her best-known role remained Quest for Fire, which was released on DVD in 2003. Chong and Perlman added commentary to the disc version of the movie, which a Washington Times journalist called "a funny, rousing and poignant adventure that hasn't aged a whit since its initial release."

In addition to her acting, Chong also wrote and directed films. Her first was the 1994 Boulevard. In 2001 she directed the horror movie Cursed, Part 3, and in 2002 she wrote and filmed the short film Mary Stigmata, about a woman struggling to make a decision in an abortion clinic. Her screenplay Blunt, described as a "modern day Cheech and Chong movie," won the 2007 WildSound Screenplay Challenge in Toronto, Canada. With her own material to fuel her, Chong seemed poised for many more years in the entertainment industry.