Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph honors Yale professor for ‘seeing her’ in emotional speech
When Yale School of Drama graduate Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Sunday night, she gave an emotional speech thanking those who’d helped her find her true self as a performer. One of them was Ron Van Lieu, who still teaches at the Yale and was sitting in the audience when Randolph gave him a memorable tribute.
“Ron Van Lieu, I thank you,” Randolph said in her speech after she won the Oscar for playing boarding school chef Mary Lamb in Alexander Payne’s film “The Holdovers.” “When I was the only Black girl in that class, you saw me and told me I was enough. When I told you I don’t see myself, you told me that’s fine, we’re going to forge our own path. You’re going to lay a trail for yourself.”
When Randolph auditioned for the Yale graduate drama department in 2008, Van Lieu was the chair of the school’s acting program. He left Yale in 2017 to revamp the acting program at Columbia University and now teaches part time at both Yale and Columbia.
“I auditioned everybody who applied. That was the first time I’d met her,” Van Lieu recalled. “She tells the story that she interviewed at several schools. She says I was the only one who expressed an interest in who she really was.”
Randolph began her Academy Award speech by saying “I didn’t know I was supposed to be doing this as a career.” As a guest on the Feb. 15 episode of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, Randolph detailed how she had to leave her studies as an opera singer at Temple University because she had taken an interest in the acting program at the same school. She ended up finishing her undergraduate degree as an actor.
In the Maron interview, Randolph talked about how she refused to sing at her first audition for the Yale program. “Beyond it being Ivy League, I did not know how profound that acting program was,” she said.
Van Lieu said that because Randolph had switched to acting late in her undergraduate studies, she didn’t actually perform in a full theater show until she was in graduate school at Yale. “The first she appeared on a stage was in ‘Jelly’s Last Jam,’” he said.
That show was a rare revival of the Broadway musical about ragtime jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, and Van Lieu remembers it as an impressive showcase of Randolph’s talents.
While in the Yale acting program, Randolph played the much-coveted role of Masha in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and an iconic Italian commedia character, Clarice, in Carlo Goldoni’s madcap “The Servant of Two Masters.” She also did some Shakespeare (verse drama being a central element of the middle year of the three-year acting program) and appeared in several contemporary works, including two plays by Sarah Ruhl and one by a classmate, Meg Miroshnik.
Van Lieu has kept in touch with Randolph in the dozen or so years since she graduated and even advised her on the part for “The Holdovers.”
“When she got the offer to do this role she called and asked me if I could read the screenplay and discuss it with her,” he said. “She saw this as a great opportunity.”
Van Lieu said he attended the Oscars ceremony at the invitation of two nominees, Randolph and Sterling K. Brown, a nominee for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Van Lieu had taught Brown at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He sat in the audience with Randolph’s parents. “We were so happy that it was the first Oscar presented,” Van Lieu said, because any anxiety over whether she would win didn’t last long.
“It was extraordinarily touching what she said,” he said. “We were all in tears listening to her. It was a lovely speech with such an important sentiment: Nobody gets to where (they) are without having other people on their side.
“It was a wonderful night,” Van Lieu added. “A wonderful night.”
There were at least 10 other nominees for the 2024 Academy Awards with Connecticut connections, whether they were born or lived in the state or attended school here. The most prominent Connecticut-rooted nominee was Paul Giamatti, up for Best Actor for “The Holdovers,” who was born and raised in New Haven and attended Choate Rosemary Hall, Yale University and the Yale School of Drama. That award went to “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy instead.