Michelle Yeoh

Photographed by Jace Lumley (GQ Interview)

Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng was born in Malaysia to a Malaysian Chinese family in 1962. In an interview with GQ, she notes that she was an “extremely competitive athlete”. Upon participating in many sports, from squash to table tennis and diving, at boarding school, she sought to pursue her dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer at the Royal Academy of Dance in London after her parents moved to the United Kingdom. However, due to her spinal injury, she laid down her dreams and ultimately, graduated with a BA in degree in Creative Arts and a minor in Drama.

 

Before gaining fame as an actress, Michelle Yeoh is also known for winning multiple beauty pageants, in which her mother secretly entered her in the first of many pageants. Her beauty and talent caught the attention from the notable Dickson Poon, which led her to be casted in a commercial with Jackie Chan. From that commercial, her career soared.

 

After taking smaller roles, she landed the starring role of the police inspector in Poon’s company D&B Film’s production of Yes, Madam in 1985, where she performed her own stunts. At the time, she was known as Michelle Khan, a stage name chosen by D&B Films to better attract international and western audiences. Yeoh, however, preferred to use her real name. Upon marrying Poon in 1988, she retired from acting as the “girls-with-guns” genre in Hong Kong cinema was in decline.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After her divorce in 1992, she returned and played powerful heroines in Supercop and Wing Chun, in which she trained hard to perfect the martial arts stunts no one thought a beauty queen or ballerina could perform. She, then, moved to the United States for a new start and gained immediate attention as the 90’s It girl through her role in James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies. Between the two-year gap before her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yeoh admits that she turned down roles that asked her to play the “fragile Asian woman”. The movie’s success led her to roles in Memoirs of a Geisha, Sunshine, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Lady, and even the CBS TV series Star Trek: Discovery.

 

Today she is well-known for her role as the “dragon mom” in Crazy Rich Asians. It is interesting to note that she spoke to the Asian American actors she worked with in the movie about their experiences as they were very different from hers. In addition to her work in CRA, she continues to be active outside of Hollywood as a United Nations Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador from 2016.

 

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