In Remembrance: Miyoshi Umeki

     Miyoshi Umeki, the first performer of Asian descent to win an Academy Award – for her stirring performance in Sayonara (1957) – passed away on August 28, 2007 in Licking, Missouri. She was 78.

     Umeki was born on May 28, 1929, in Otaru, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where her father owned a well-respected iron factory. As the youngest of nine children, she found herself easily influenced by traditional Kabuki theater and American pop music she heard on the radio. The conflicts of World War II caused her parents to hate American music, so she secretly practiced singing while under her bedcovers.

     At the end of World War II, a teenaged Umeki was earning 90 cents a night at service clubs in Otaru singing with American G.I. bands, mimicking the vocal styles of Dinah Shore, Doris Day and Peggy Lee. She could later be heard on Japanese radio with the Tusnoda Sextet, Japan’s equivalent to the Harry James Orchestra. Adopting the name Nancy Umeki, she recorded numerous American standards for RCA Japan before arriving in America in 1955 and signing with Mercury Records. Umeki soon found her way onto American television after recording a couple of singles. A recurring engagement on the television series Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts caught the attention of director Joshua Logan.

     Logan asked her to star opposite comedian Red Buttons in his upcoming film, Sayonara, based on the best-selling James A. Michener novel. Unlike most 1950s American romantic dramas, Sayonara grappled with the themes of racism and prejudice. The film’s main focus centered upon the forbidden romance between US servicemen and Japanese women during the Korean War. Red Buttons played a love-smitten Air Force sergeant who encourages the naïve Katsumi (portrayed by Umeki) to marry him in spite of the disapproval placed upon them by the United States military. Ultimately, the ridicule and persecution that follows leads to their double suicide. Umeki and Buttons won Oscars for their supporting parts.

     Despite Umeki’s landmark win, the place for Asians in American cinema stayed relatively small and starring roles were much sparser. Many available roles were still given to Americans made to look their Asian counterparts. For this reason, Umeki turned her sights to Broadway and scored a lead role in the new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song (1958). Her endearing performance as the Chinese “picture bride” Mei Li garnered Umeki a Tony nomination. 

     Umeki returned to Hollywood and portrayed Mei Li in the 1961 screen adaptation of Flower Drum Song and appeared in a handful of East-meets-West stories including the comedy Cry for Happy (1961), with Glenn Ford and Donald O’Connor, and the 1962 romantic comedy The Horizontal Lieutenant with Jim Hutton and Jim Backus. 

     Giving up film in favor of television, Umeki appeared on a number of popular programs throughout the 1960s, such as Dr. Kildare, Rawhide and Mr.Ed. Her faithful role in the Bill Bixby TV series The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, as Mrs. Livingston, the housekeeper, was seen in many households. When the show retired in 1972, she did the same and lived quietly outside of the Hollywood spotlight.

- John L. Gibbon