Background
Chok was born in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, of Chinese ancestry.
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Vera Chok
Edit ProfileEducation
After attending Assunta Primary and Secondary schools in Malaysia and Abbots Bromley School in Staffordshire, she graduated from Queens College, Oxford, before training as an actor at the Poor School in London and with Philippe Gaulier in Paris.
Career
Chok"s main theatre roles have included parts in the award-winning Lucy Kirkwood play Chimerica (2013), as part of the original cast at the Almeida and Harold Pinter theatres and in The World of Extreme Happiness (The Shed at the National, 2013), in which she co-starred with Katie Leung. Chok played the part of Ming Ming, a female migrant worker, in a production about the world of migrant workers in rapidly emerging modern China. In 2015, Chok appeared in Nicholas Hytner"s final production as artistic director for the National, Tom Stoppard"s The Hard Problem.
The play was Stoppard"s first for the theatre since 2006 and a special screening was broadcast live to cinemas.
She subsequently had roles in the Kenneth Branagh Company production of The Winter"s Tale at the Garrick in late 2015 and an associated work, Terence Rattigan"s Harlequinade, also at the Garrick, which humorously depicts a postwar CEMA-sponsored theatrical troop at a provincial theatre in Brackley making a hash of Romeo and Juliet and "the intrigues and dalliances of the company members". Chok was nominated in the 2015 British Broadcasting Corporation Audio Drama Awards (Best Debut Performance In An Audio Drama) for her performance in the British Broadcasting Corporation 3 production of British Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo"s first play, Dostoevsky And The Chickens (2014), in which she co-starred.
In Liao Yimei"s comedy drama Rhinoceros in Love, also for 3, she plays the beautiful Mingming, the object of a zookeeper"s longing, in a performance described by the Sunday Times as "bewitching". She appeared in Jingo (2008, Finborough, London) and played the lead role of Lila in the stage adaptation of Philip Pullman"s The Firework-Maker"s Daughter (2011, by the Lake) - described by The Stage as a "poignant performance".
In addition, Chok has appeared in a number of independent and main release films and in the long-running Independent Television series Coronation Street.
Whatsonstage.com named her one of "15 theatre faces to look out for in 2015". Asked by the magazine to give her advice on International Women"s Day, Chok said "Play the long game: stay open, generous, and keep developing your craft." In 2010 Chok founded saltpeter, an independent theatre company. She produced and starred in their opera production Tonseisha - The Manitoba Who Abandoned the World (2014 - Studio, Central Saint Martins), which is adapted from the play by Erik Patterson.
In the work, which features opera, dance and theatre, Chok played Yukiko, a Japanese woman haunted by the losses of her father and Beat writer Richard Brautigan.
In 2011, she founded the Brautigan Book Club, which stimulates creative explorations based on Brautigan"s work.
