Rae Dawn Chong was born February 28, 1961 in Edmonton, Canada. After a few film and television spots, Rae Dawn earned a Genie for her performance in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s prehistoric-drama Quest for Fire (1981). She played the young, Ivaka prisoner, Ika. Other notables roles include Harpo’s girlfriend “Squeek””, aka, Mary Agnes in Steven Spielberg’s five-time Academy Award-nominated film, The Color Purple (1985), and James Remar’s beautiful and mysterious wife, Carola in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990).”
Rae Dawn Chong
Movies
Commando
A retired special agent named John Matrix led an elite unit and has left the armed forces to live in a secluded mountain home with his daughter Jenny. But now he is forced out of retirement when his daughter is kidnapped by a band of thugs intent on revenge! Unbeknownst…
Fun Facts
Daughter of Tommy Chong and Maxine Sneed. Sister of Robbi Chong. Half-sister of Paris Chong, Gilbran Chong, Precious Chong, and Marcus Chong. (Marcus, the biological son of Martin Wyatt, a local newscaster in the San Francisco Bay Area, was adopted by her father and stepmother, Shelby Chong.).
Was going to play Willis's girlfriend on Diff'rent Strokes (1978), but producers thought that she wasn't ethnic looking enough and cast Janet Jackson instead.
Naturalized United States citizen.
Subject of Stephen Lynch's song, RDC (Opie's Lament).
Rae's paternal grandfather, Stanley Chong, was Chinese, and Rae's paternal grandmother, Lorna Jean Gilchrist, was of Scots-Irish descent. Rae's maternal grandparents, Napoleon Sneed and Willa Carothers, were both the children of African-American immigrants to Canada (their families were from the American South).
Discovered Chris Pratt (who starred on the WB's Everwood (2002)) while he was a waiter at a restaurant in Hawaii where she was eating dinner one evening.
An active volunteer for many charities, strongly supporting Habitat for Humanity and Byron Katie's work with inmates in prisons.
Mentioned in the Alice in Chains song "Love Song""
Quotes
Unattractive people are more obsessed with looks.
I have a good mind but I don't like to bore anyone with it.
Whoopi Goldberg is a blazing trail for black women - for just black anything to be successful. Still, I often ask myself if I have to be a 30-year-old ex-junkie who lived in Berkeley and did stand-up comedy in Germany, before I can get some respect.