Soon-Tek Oh, Actor Who Chafed at Asian Stereotypes, Dies at 85

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In 1965, Pat Li of East West Players explained why the company, which she and eight others had started that year in Los Angeles to promote substantive roles for Asian-American actors, was needed.

“You don’t know how tired you can get of always being Suzie Wong,” she said. “Or a houseboy.”

As if to prove the point, not long afterward, another East West founder, Soon-Tek Oh, landed one of his first television roles — as a houseboy.

It was in an episode of the science-fiction series “The Invaders.” In his scene, which lasted less than a minute, Mr. Oh’s job was to usher David Vincent, the show’s lead character, played by Roy Thinnes, into a meeting with some other white characters. Mr. Oh spoke 17 words.

It must have been the kind of part that irked him, and it certainly wasn’t the last such stereotypical role he played in a long career that included more than 100 TV and film appearances.

While keeping that busy schedule, Mr. Oh, who died on April 4 in Los Angeles at 85, worked to broaden the types of roles available to Asian-American actors, first through East West Players and later through other theater troupes that he founded or guided.

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The actor and producer Chil Kong, who confirmed Mr. Oh’s death and said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease, recalled how Mr. Oh took him under his wing in 1994 during a production in Boston of “The Woman Warrior,” a stage version of a pair of memoirs by the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston.

Mr. Kong, an understudy in a cast that included Mr. Oh, was still a student at the Boston Conservatory and largely unaware of the history and heritage he was a part of, until Mr. Oh schooled him.

“I began to understand that my story was a small strand in a rich tapestry of Asians in America,” Mr. Kong wrote in a tribute posted after Mr. Oh’s death. “I began to understand that my struggle as an artist of color was a small trail off of a well-traveled highway forged on the shoulders of passionate people before me, people like Mr. Oh.”

Soon-Tek Oh was born on June 29, 1932, in Mokpo, a city in what is now South Korea. (At the time, it was under Japanese occupation.) He graduated from Yonsei University in Seoul in 1959 and then, like many other young Koreans, went to the United States to study. He enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, and received a master’s degree in acting and playwriting there.

His list of television credits began in 1965 with small roles on “I Spy.” The bit parts he played early in his career hit pretty much all the stereotypes of the time — a houseboy on both “The Invaders” and “The Wild Wild West” in 1967, a servant on “It Takes a Thief” in 1969, and so on.

But from the beginning he was looking for more substantive projects, if not on the screen then onstage. He and others mounted a production of “Rashomon” that coalesced into the founding of East West Players in 1965. The founders included, in addition to Mr. Oh, the Japanese actor Mako and the Chinese-American actors James Hong and Beulah Quo.

The company, now in its 52nd season, started out playing to largely Japanese-American audiences. But it gradually expanded its vision and appeal, staging not only traditional repertoire from throughout Asia but also new works addressing the experiences of second- and third-generation Asian-Americans, as well as Western classics with Asian-American casts.

Mr. Oh wore other hats besides actor; for instance, he wrote “Have You Heard,” a bilingual work about Korean immigrants that the company staged in 1982.

In 1978, Mr. Oh formed the Korean American Theater Ensemble, a bilingual company, also based in the Los Angeles area, that he hoped would help introduce second-generation Korean-Americans to Korean culture. In 1992, concerned about the societal divisions revealed by the riots in Los Angeles that year, he reconstituted that company as the Society of Heritage Performers, with a new sense of urgency.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Oh sought to hand that troupe off to a younger generation, and a group that included Mr. Kong took it on and turned its framework into the Lodestone Theater Ensemble, which promoted innovative works for the next decade.

Mr. Oh’s theater career also included a notable Broadway appearance in “Pacific Overtures,” the 1976 Stephen Sondheim musical. He worked steadily in film and television for four decades.

Mr. Oh appeared in multiple episodes of “M*A*S*H,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “Touched by an Angel” and other series. He was in the James Bond movie “The Man With the Golden Gun” in 1974, the Chuck Norris film “Missing in Action 2” in 1985 and the Chris Farley comedy “Beverly Hills Ninja” in 1997. And he was the voice of Fa Zhou, the title character’s father, in the animated “Mulan” in 1998.

Mr. Oh’s survivors include a son, James, and a sister, Onjah.

Tim Dang, who recently stepped down after leading East West Players for 23 years, reflected on the progress made since Mr. Oh and the others created the company more than a half-century ago. Four generations of artists — about 5,000 in all — have come through the company, he said by email, and many other theater troupes have followed the Players’ model.

“Soon-Tek was a masterful storyteller,” Mr. Dang wrote, “both as an actor and a writer, in English and in Korean, navigating the challenging terrain of Hollywood yet never compromising the culturally rich community he came from that was constantly underrepresented and, when represented, was often misinterpreted.

“His legacy lives on in all of us, in all the stories we tell, and the places we tell them.”