Margaret Cho

She was raised in a racially diverse neighborhood near the Ocean Beach section of San Francisco, which she described as a community of "old hippies, ex-druggies, burn-outs from the 1960s, drag queens, Chinese people, and Koreans. To say it was a melting pot – that's the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time."

Cho's parents, Young-Hie and Seung-Hoon Cho, ran Paperback Traffic, a bookstore on Polk Street at California Street in San Francisco.

Her father writes joke books and a newspaper column in Seoul, South Korea.

At school, Cho was bullied, saying that "I was hurt because I was different, and so sharing my experience of being beaten and hated and called fat and queer and foreign and perverse and gluttonous and lazy and filthy and dishonest and yet all the while remaining invisible heals me, and heals others when they hear it – those who are suffering right now."

Between the ages of five and twelve, Cho was "sexually molested by a family friend".

Margaret Moran Cho (born December 5, 1968 ) is an American comedian and actress.

She is known for her stand-up routines, through which she critiques social and political problems, especially regarding race and sexuality.

Cho was born in 1968 to a family of Korean origin in San Francisco, California.

Her paternal grandfather Myung-sook Cho, a Christian minister, worked for the Japanese as a station master during their occupation of Korea.

When Japan withdrew from Korea at the end of World War II, he was denounced as a traitor by North Korea's Communist regime, and forced to move with his family, including his son, Cho's father Seung-hoon Cho, to South Korea.

During the Korean War, Myung-sook ran an orphanage in Seoul.

According to Margaret herself, she "grew up in the church."

In 1992, she appeared on the unsuccessful Golden Girls spin-off The Golden Palace in a small role.

She rose to prominence after starring in the ABC sitcom All-American Girl (1994–95), and became an established stand-up comic in the subsequent years.

As an actress, she has acted in such roles as Charlene Lee in It's My Party and John Travolta's FBI colleague in the action film Face/Off. Cho was part of the cast of the TV series Drop Dead Diva on Lifetime Television, in which she appeared as Teri Lee, a paralegal assistant.

In 1994, Cho won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Comedian.

After the show's 1995 cancellation, Cho became addicted to drugs and alcohol.

On the Loveline May 21, 1997 show with Adam Carolla and Drew Pinsky, she talks about being raped by her uncle, while during the same time period he was raping his three-year-old daughter.

She often skipped class and got bad grades in ninth and tenth grades, resulting in her expulsion from Lowell High School.

Cho said she was "raped continuously through my youngest years" (by another acquaintance), and that when she told someone else about it and her classmates found out, she received hostile remarks justifying it, including accusations of being "so fat" that only a crazy person would have sex with her.

After Cho expressed an interest in performance, she auditioned and was accepted into the San Francisco School of the Arts, a San Francisco public high school for the arts.

While at the school, she became involved with the school's improvisational comedy group alongside actors Sam Rockwell and Aisha Tyler.

At age 15, she worked as a phone sex operator, and she later worked as a dominatrix.

After graduating from high school, Cho attended San Francisco State University, studying drama; she did not graduate.

After doing several shows in a club adjacent to her parents' bookstore, Cho launched a stand-up comedy career and spent several years developing her material in clubs.

Cho's career began to build after appearances on television and university campuses.

In 1997, she had a supporting role in the thriller film Face/Off starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, playing Wanda, one of the fellow FBI agents of Travolta's primary character.

As detailed in her 2002 autobiography, I'm the One That I Want, in 1995, her substance abuse was evident during a performance in Monroe, Louisiana, where she was booed off the stage by 800 college students after going on the stage drunk.

Though her career and personal life were challenging after the show's cancellation, Cho eventually sobered up, refocused her energy, and developed new material.

She hosted the New Year's Rockin' Eve 95 show with Steve Harvey.

In 2010, on The View, she discussed her nervousness about doing The Golden Palace and thanked the late Rue McClanahan for her help with rehearsing.

She also secured a coveted spot as opening act for Jerry Seinfeld; at about this time, she was featured on a Bob Hope special, and was also a frequent visitor to The Arsenio Hall Show.

That same year, ABC developed and aired a sitcom based on Cho's stand-up routine.

The show, titled All-American Girl, was initially promoted as the first show prominently featuring an East Asian family, although the short-lived sitcom Mr. T and Tina, which had starred Noriyuki "Pat" Morita as Mr. T., preceded it by nearly two decades.

Cho has expressed subsequent regret for much of what transpired during the production of the show, specifically:

The show was canceled after suffering poor ratings and the effect of major content changes over the course of its single season (19 episodes).

For her portrayal of Kim Jong-il on 30 Rock, she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2012.

In 2022, Cho co-starred in the film Fire Island, a portrayal of the LGBT Asian American experience in the eponymous gay village off the South Shore of Long Island.

She has also had endeavors in fashion and music, and has her own clothing line.

Cho has also frequently supported LGBT rights and has won awards for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of women, Asian Americans, and the LGBT community.