On the red carpet recently for the Los Angeles premiere of HBO's new miniseries "The Sympathizer," she is regal in gold and black silk – glittering among Hollywood stars Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh.

You'd never know that five decades ago this month, actress Kieu Chinh was "homeless among the clouds," as she recounts in her memoir, "Kieu Chinh: An Artist in Exile," about how she became an accidental movie star in her native Vietnam and her refugee journey as Saigon fell in 1975.

Yet, with the trauma of a survivor, here she is reliving the Vietnam War in "an espionage thriller and cross-culture satire" based on Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The miniseries, also streaming Sundays on Max, features award-winning filmmaker Park Chan-wook and Downey, who just won a best supporting actor Oscar for "Oppenheimer."

"I am so proud of our entire production for bringing to life a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Vietnamese story adapted and played by a majority Vietnamese cast – especially our new young star Hoa Xuande as The Captain," Kieu Chinh told me of "The Sympathizer."

"As a period piece, you can imagine when we’re shooting some of these visually stunning scenes it was extremely emotional,"........

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