Robert here. On Tuesday British actor Dev Patel became only the third actor of Indian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award. His nomination came amongst a renewed embrace of diversity (which is something to celebrate, but not rest on) after two years of completely white sets of nominees.
The Oscars – and, of course, the film industry at large – have long courted controversy for their issues with diversity, and Asian actors across the board have long been overlooked and undervalued. Often they are cast in flat, stereotyped roles, or as we've been made much more aware of lately, the roles of leading characters of Asian descent are given to white actors. Before Dev there have been several actors of Asian descent whose strong work has garnered them award attention, and even more who were snubbed despite memorable performances.
A brief retrospective is after the jump:
Of the two other actors of Indian descent who have scored Oscar nominations, the most famous is British legend and (in my opinion) timeless hunk Sir Ben Kingsley, who won best actor in 1982 for his role as political leader Mahatma Gandhi in Gandhi . He was nominated three subsequent times for House of Sand and Fog, Bugsy and Sexy Beast. The other is old Hollywood starlet Merle Oberon – of mixed British and Indian ancestry, a fact she tried to hide from the public – was nominated in 1935 for wartime thriller The Dark Angel.
Oberon is the only woman of any kind of Asian heritage to be nominated for best actress, but there have been several that could be considered snubs. Chinese actress Gong Li won multiple awards worldwide for her performance in Raise the Red Lantern, while Michelle Yeoh and Zang Ziyi both entertained awards talk for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. More recently, Kim Hye-ja won a slew of international awards for her staring turn in South Korean film Mother.
On the supporting actress side of things there are Miyoshi Umeki, who won the award in 1957 for Sayonara, and nominees Rinko Kikuchi for Babel and sisters Meg (Agnes of God) and Jennifer Tilly (Bullets Over Broadway), who are of mixed Chinese and European heritage.
One of my all-time favorite film performances is Mieko Harada as the vengeful Lady Kaede in Kurosawa's masterpiece Ran. It is a performance of such physical menace and measured line readings that it could be studied in acting classes. She was unfortunately snubbed, despite Ran's international success.
Best supporting actor has seem several nominations for actors of Asian descent. Well known thespians such as Ken Watanabe for The Last Samurai and Pat Morita in The Karate Kid are the most remembered, but there have been less well-known actors nominated, including Haing S. Ngor, who won for The Killing Fields in 1984. The list of snubs would be long, but we'd have to start with whichever Chinese actor lost out for Linda Hunt's role in The Year of Living Dangerously (1983).