Hiep Thi Le, who has died aged 46 from stomach cancer, became a film star after travelling to the US from Vietnam as a child in the late 1970s, one of hundreds of thousands of refugees known as “boat people”. In her early 20s she landed the lead role in Oliver Stone’s 1993 drama Heaven and Earth despite never having acted before.

Based on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, who, like Le, had arrived in America from Da Nang, the movie was the last and least successful part of the director’s Vietnam trilogy, following Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). It was also one of the few films of his to feature a female protagonist. Le was required to age more than 30 years in the course of the movie as Hayslip, who is raped and tortured in her home country, where she is accused of aiding the Vietcong, and who eventually marries a US marine (played by Tommy Lee Jones) with demons of his own.

Le was born in Da Nang, one of seven children, and was forced to flee her war-torn country with her siblings when their father escaped to Hong Kong. When Le was eight, she and her younger sister stowed away in a secret compartment on a fishing boat, believing their mother to be travelling on the same vessel when in fact she had stayed behind with the other children. It was a perilous journey – “everyone thought we were going to die,” she recalled – which ended when the boat, which had exhausted its provisions, was towed in to Hong Kong, where the sisters were taken to the first of several refugee camps. They had given up all hope of finding their father when by chance they encountered him in the third of these camps. “He had come looking for us, and by then we had been told to change our names for safety and to blend in. He called us by our real names, and it was a moment of sweet happiness that will always stay with me.”

The family was eventually reunited in northern California. Le, who taught herself to read and write English, was educated at Oakland high school and at the University of California, Davis, where she studied physiology. It was during this period that she agreed to attend an opening casting call for Heaven and Earth in San Jose with her sister, in exchange for a ride to the nearby flea market. She found the whole process tiresome and was surprised to receive a call the following week asking her to meet Stone. After an arduous five-month audition programme in which 16,000 applicants for the lead role were whittled down to one, the part was hers.

Many of the nuances in the drama, however, were trampled by the famously bombastic film-maker. And though some critics praised Le’s performance, others felt she had been overstretched by her director’s demands. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker argued that it was “unfair to expect an actress of no previous experience to play a woman who ends up with more experience than she would care to remember”.

Following Heaven and Earth, Le intended to return to her studies and go to medical school, but low scores in her admission tests put paid to her plans. She continued to act, albeit in much smaller parts, mostly billed as “waitress,” “nurse” or “secretary”. She was in Bugis Street (1995), a story of transvestites in Singapore, as well as in Cruel Intentions (1999), a witty, teenage Dangerous Liaisons. In 2001 she had parts in the horror film Return to Pontianak (aka Voodoo Nightmare), directed by her Singaporean husband, Ong Lay Jinn, and Green Dragon, a drama with Patrick Swayze about Vietnamese refugees in the US. She was also in the Neil LaBute thriller Lakeview Terrace in 2008. One of her regrets was not getting the chance to be funnier on screen. “Asian people are very funny,” she said. “In my Vietnamese culture there is no end to laughter and joking, storytelling and poetry. It lets us breathe.”

In 2002 she began a second career in the Californian restaurant business, becoming a chef at China Beach Bistro in Venice Beach and later both chef and owner of Le Cellier in Marina Del Rey. She featured in this capacity in 2014 on the competitive cooking show Chopped.

She is survived by her husband, their two children and her parents.

• Hiep Thi Le, actor, born 18 February 1971; died 19 December 2017