Hiep Thi Le, who escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat when she was about 9 and a dozen years later became an unlikely movie star when she was cast as the central figure in Oliver Stone’s 1993 film “Heaven and Earth,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 46.

The cause was stomach cancer, her friend Quentin Lee said.

Ms. Le was born in Da Nang, in central Vietnam, on Feb. 18, 1971, while the Vietnam War was still raging. Turmoil after the fall of Saigon in 1975 led tens of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country toward the end of that decade. The boat people, they were called, and Ms. Le was one of them. Her father had already left the country, and her mother arranged for her and a younger sister to steal away aboard a fishing boat.

“We were just told by my mom that we had to go look for Dad,” she once told an interviewer, “and that he had gone to someplace called America, which we interpreted was the city across the river, since it had lights.”

She said that she and her sister spent time in several refugee camps in Hong Kong and eventually did find her father, by happenstance. Sponsored by a church, they were brought to the United States, where they were eventually reunited with the rest of the family and settled near Oakland, Calif.