Michelle Yeoh

Michelle Yeoh was born Michelle Yeo Choo Kheng on 6 August 1962 in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia. She moved to Britain as a teenager and studied at the Royal Academy of Dance in London, where a spinal injury ended her hopes of becoming a professional ballet dancer. In 1983 she won Miss Malaysia and represented the country at Miss World in London. A television commercial with Jackie Chan led to attention from Hong Kong film producer Dickson Poon. Yeoh signed with his company, D&B Films, and began making action pictures whose demanding stunt work became central to her screen identity thereafter. Her early Hong Kong films included Yes, Madam! (1985), in which she and Cynthia Rothrock played inspectors battling criminals, and Royal Warriors (1986). In Police Story 3: Supercop (1992), Yeoh played Chinese intelligence officer Jessica Yang opposite Chan; the film contains the motorcycle leap onto a moving train associated with her work. She followed it with The Heroic Trio, Wing Chun, and the contemporary action hit Supercop 2, also released as Project S. After retiring briefly following her marriage to Poon, she returned to films in 1993. Her stature came from performing elaborate fights and dangerous practical stunts herself often. International audiences encountered her in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), as Chinese agent Wai Lin, who works with Pierce Brosnan's James Bond against media magnate Elliot Carver. In Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), she portrayed Yu Shu Lien, seasoned warrior whose restrained love for Li Mu Bai runs alongside the theft of the Green Destiny sword. The Mandarin-language film won four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, and made Yeoh a recognized lead. She played Mameha in Memoirs of a Geisha, an aunt in Crazy Rich Asians, and a assassin in Gunpowder Milkshake. Her celebrated performance came in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). She played Evelyn Quan Wang, a weary laundromat owner whose audit by the Internal Revenue Service opens into a multiverse story involving fractured versions of her family. The role demanded comedy, martial arts, sorrow, and the portrayal of several alternate Evelyns. Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the performance in 2023, becoming the first Asian woman to win that category. She also received a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2024 she appeared as Madame Morrible in Wicked, a film adaptation of the stage musical.