Bio: 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).
Tivia: 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.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.).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).An active volunteer for many charities, strongly supporting Habitat for Humanity and Byron Katie's work with inmates in prisons.Is married, the mother of two sons, and divides her time between Vancouver, B.C. (where she lives) and Los Angeles, California (where she works). (November 2003)Mentioned in the Alice in Chains song "Love Song", from their 1992 EP "Sap".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).She and Commando (1985) co-star Alyssa Milano each starred in different episodes of The Outer Limits (1995).