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actress, Angela Rockwood, car accident, Celebrity, Hong Kong, internal bleeding, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, performed stunts, Power Rangers, Spy Hard, The Crow, Thuy Trane, Trini Kwan, United States, Vietnamese, Yellow Ranger
Thuy Trang (December 14, 1973 – September 3, 2001)
Thuy Trang was a Vietnamese-American actress. She was known for her role as Trini Kwan, the first Yellow Ranger on the original cast of the television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Trang’s father was a South Vietnamese army officer who fled the country in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, leaving his family behind. When Trang was six, she and her mother and brothers boarded a cargo ship bound for Hong Kong, a difficult journey during which Trang became very ill. They reunited with Trang’s father in the United States in 1980 and settled in California. She enrolled at the University of California, Irvine to study civil engineering, but switched her focus to acting after a talent scout spotted her.
Trang was chosen for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, her first major role, after participating in an audition process that included about 500 actresses. Like the other cast members, Trang mostly portrayed her character in scenes when she was out of her Power Rangers uniform; the in-costume fight scenes were footage adapted from the long-running Japanese television series Super Sentai, with Trang’s voice dubbed over the action. Trang appeared in 80 episodes in the series, which included the entire first season, and the first twenty episodes of the second. She performed many of her own stunts, and repeatedly got hurt on the set.
Trang left Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the middle of the second season, along with fellow cast members Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones, due to contractual and payment disputes and was replaced by Karan Ashley as the Yellow Ranger. She had a brief appearance in the film Spy Hard (1996), and played one of the lead villains in the film The Crow: City of Angels (1996). Trang had planned to appear in several films along with St. John and Jones, but none were ultimately made.
On September 3, 2001, the 27-year-old Trang was traveling with her friend, the actress and model Angela Rockwood, for whom Trang was to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming marriage to Dustin Nguyen.They were passengers in a car traveling on Interstate 5 between San Jose and Los Angeles, driving back late at night after having visited Rockwood’s maid of honor in San Jose. The driver, another bridesmaid named Steffiana de la Cruz, struck some loose gravel in a groove along the side of the street, and lost control of the vehicle. The car swerved violently across the road before hitting the roadside rock face, flipping several times before hitting the safety rail and plunging over the bank and into a second rock face. Rockwood was thrown 35 feet out of the car and survived, but her spinal cord was severed and she was rendered quadriplegic. The driver also survived the accident. Trang suffered internal injuries; and, after a paramedic inserted an endotracheal tube in her throat, blood began gushing out due to internal bleeding. A helicopter arrived to take her to the hospital, but she died along the way.