Thai Film Star Waits Tables in New Homeland : The ‘Doris Day’ of Thai cinema made 29 movies. Sasitorn Phetroong Kulka now works in a Glendale restaurant.

No one seems to notice the diminutive, easygoing waitress who moves through a Thai restaurant in Glendale in virtual anonymity on a Friday night. Waiting tables is usually an actress’ first profession, but Sasitorn Phetroong Kulka has reversed the order.

Before moving to the United States 12 years ago, Kulka made 29 films and at least 60 television programs in Thailand. She calls herself the “Doris Day” of Thai cinema.

Despite more than a decade away from acting, the Los Angeles Thai press still routinely runs stories about her.

“It’s good for my newspaper to have her story in it. Everybody’s interested in reading it. She’s like Elizabeth Taylor: Whatever she does, everybody wants to know what she’s doing,” said Viraj Rojanapanya, editor of Thai LA Newspaper, which runs a photo feature on Kulka every year on her birthday, Nov. 17.

TV Parade, a Thai entertainment magazine based in Los Angeles that covers Los Angeles and Bangkok, also runs the occasional story on Kulka “because a lot of people recognize her and want to know what’s happened to her,” said Managing Editor Cuthaleeya Chaturongkul, who compares Kulka to the late Jill Ireland because both actresses had relationships with famous leading men in their countries.

Both editors suggest that Kulka’s popularity stems as much from this association as her acting work. She still receives fan letters from Thailand, and Thai newspapers periodically run stories about her.

At 42, her large brown eyes, long sloping nose and creaseless face seem scarcely to have changed since her movie debut 24 years ago.

She lives in a modest stucco house in Burbank, simply furnished and decorated with photo collages of herself and her American husband. In the living room, flanked by an Eastern altar with figures from Nepal and Laos and a Thai Buddha, and by a Western altar of TV, stereo, VCR, and CD player, Kulka pulls out a stack of scrapbooks and traces her path from growing rice in Thailand to serving it half a world away.

She grew up as Sasitorn Phetroong, the eldest of five children in the village of Banna, about 60 miles east of Bangkok. Though her father worked as a bureaucrat, he also had a small rice farm, and Kulka remembers midday siestas spent lying on the backs of water buffaloes to ensure that they wouldn’t eat the crop.

Her chance to escape the village came in a local beauty contest. Sponsored by the sheriff, Kulka won the title of Miss Nakorn Nayok, representing a province. The mayor of Thonburi, a big city on the lookout for Miss Bangkok contestants, paid for Kulka to study at a beauty school for women in Bangkok.

Under the tutelage of the beauty school operator--herself an actress and a former Miss Universe runner-up--Kulka entered and won 10 beauty contests, including Miss Bangkok. She captured every crown she vied for, except Miss Thailand, for which she was the 10th runner-up.

Kulka, who goes by the nickname Lake, which means small in Thai, shakes her hair, drawn up into a spout of black ringlets that cascade down her shoulders, before she segues from her role as beauty queen to star of the silver screen.

“At that time they were looking for beauty contest girls that would look good in the camera,” she said.

It was the beauty school proprietor who taught Kulka acting and introduced her to a number of Thai film producers. She was on a movie set in 1966 when she met the other person she considers instrumental in teaching her to act.

“He was the biggest star in Thailand,” said Kulka of Mit Chaibuncha, whom she called the Clark Gable of Thai cinema. They soon began to play opposite each other, on screen and off. By 1968, Chaibuncha and Kulka were living together in Bangkok.

She was usually cast in the supporting role of “nice girls, because the people didn’t accept me as others,” Kulka said.

Kulka would often work on as many as five films at once, a common practice for Thai actors. Chaibuncha, by contrast, made as many as 10 films at once “because everybody always wanted to see him,” she said.

When they weren’t working, Kulka and Chaibuncha would wait until after one of their movies started, then slip into a theater to study their performances and hear the audience’s reaction.

During the height of their popularity, Kulka and Chaibuncha seldom went unrecognized in public.

“She doesn’t seem to mind when people recognize her, and she doesn’t have any privacy. She looks happy when people recognize her,” said Rumpeuy Kerdpinyo, Kulka’ sister, who now lives in Los Angel es.

Then, one windy day in 1970, tragedy struck. Chaibuncha was performing a movie stunt that called for him to hang from a ladder beneath a helicopter as it flew over a beach. He lost his grip and fell several hundred feet to his death.

Kulka was at a beauty shop at the time, having her hair dyed. The crew sent Chaibuncha’s driver to tell her.

Twenty years later, Kulka can still recall those dark days. “I can’t speak for days, only cry,” she said.

“She went to the temple every night for 100 nights for three months. She always looked real upset, real sick, and she cried every day,” said Kerdpinyo, who was sent to stay with her.

“It was big, big news at the time,” Kulka said. Chaibuncha’s body had to be on display for 100 days instead of the usual seven or eight “so people could come and see him.”

Although Kulka continued to make movies for two more years, by all accounts, her heart wasn’t in it.

In 1972, she decided to come to the United States and study English. “I think she wanted to forget all those things,” said Kerdpinyo.

Kulka’s husband, David, a free-lance electronics technician, agrees. “I think that’s basically why she came to America. She just wanted a change of scene.”

She spent the next six years alternating stints of learning English in the Los Angeles area with making movies in Thailand. In 1978 she moved to Los Angeles permanently, but retained her Thai citizenship. By the early ‘80s she had met the man who would become her husband. Kulka was working as a waitress in a Thai restaurant where David Kulka used to get lunch.

For two or three months, he asked her out, but she would never go. He stopped asking; the two remained friends, and he continued to go to the restaurant.

But it wasn’t until a trip to Thailand that David Kulka discovered her past identity.

“I was talking to this woman on a street in Bangkok and I had a picture I’d taken of her in the restaurant,” he said, referring to a photograph of Kulka. “I showed this woman the picture as someone I had a crush on, and she said, ‘This woman is a very famous movie star.’ ”

“When I got back I asked her about it, and she admitted that, yes, she’d been an actress in Thailand . . . but she still wouldn’t go out with me,” he said.

Two years later, Kulka changed her mind and asked David out. She says it was his persistence that eventually won her over. That was seven years ago, and “we’ve been together ever since, said David Kulka, who is six years younger than his wife. They were married in their back yard in 1985.

The Kulkas managed to generate a fair amount of interest in the Thai press when they made their first trip to Thailand as husband and wife about a year after their marriage. The story and accompanying photos of the Thai wedding ceremony they held for her family received so much attention that people started to recognize David Kulka on the street.

These days, Kulka busies herself with keeping house, gardening, and waitressing a few nights a week at TepThai. For Kulka, work is an opportunity to socialize. “I like to see the people and be with the people,” she said.

Although she lives almost in the back yard of Burbank’s media district, the closest she has come to the American movie industry is watching them film NBC’s “McMillan and Wife.” On taking up acting in this country, Kulka says only, “My English isn’t good enough.”

David Kulka has never seen any of his wife’s films, despite repeated trips to Thailand since their marriage. They’ve been told that most of her movies are in bits and pieces now, the originals long gone.

The Kulkas haven’t been able to find her films in Thai video stores in Bangkok or Los Angeles. On a recent trip to Bangkok, Kulka approached one of the studios where she worked about trying to reconstruct one of her films from several different prints. She hopes to be able to get a videotape copy of one of her reconstructed films on her next trip to Thailand, possibly at the end of the year.

Kulka still keeps in contact with a number of Thai movie producers. She said they’ve told her she’s welcome to return to movie work whenever she wants, but she always declines. “My husband doesn’t want me to because it would take too long,” Kulka said. “I wouldn’t absolutely stop her, but I wouldn’t be very happy about it either,” said David Kulka, who doesn’t relish the thought of being separated from his wife for three or four months, the time it would take to complete one film.

Although his work would allow him the option of staying with his wife while she made a movie, financial considerations have prevented him from doing that, David Kulka says.

Even though Kulka has been out of the limelight for more than a decade, people still stop her on the street when she returns to Thailand.

“Many people, when they see me, they ask, ‘Why don’t you come back?’ ” said Kulka, who confesses she misses acting “a little bit.”

“Sometimes when I watch videos I want to be back and making movies, but I’m married now, and I think I better stay with my husband.”