Sumalee Montano

Sumalee Montano (สุมาลีรัตน์ มอนทาโน; ; born August 3, 1972) is an American actress and voice actress, born in Columbus, Ohio, United States. She worked as an investment bank analyst in New York City and Hong Kong before starting her acting career and is also a writer. She has acted in ER, Minority Report, The West Wing, Boston Legal, Bones, Nip/Tuck, Hancock, and Commander in Chief. As a voice actor, she provided the voices of Mystique in X-Men: Destiny, Yerema in Dead Island, Cali in Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, Arcee in Transformers: Prime and Mera in Justice League: Throne of Atlantis. She currently resides in Los Angeles where she continues to work on her career.

Early life
Montano is of Filipino and Thai descent and grew up mostly in the United States, but also spent a few years in Bangkok, Thailand. During her high school career, she began acting as an extracurricular.

Education and acting career
She graduated from Harvard University in 1993 and is a U.S. Fulbright scholar. After graduation, she worked as an investment-banking analyst for Morgan Stanley for a few years. After realizing investment banking wasn't something she was passionate about, Montano quit and went backpacking through Africa before realizing she wanted to pursue acting professionally.

Montano has taken on a variety of different roles, both live-action and voice-over. She is talented in using many different accents, including Chinese, Filipino, British, Southern, Thai, Vietnamese, Eastern European, and Japanese.

Her first legitimate role was playing the nurse Duvata Mahal for three seasons of the TV show ER.