Michelle Yeoh

Her father was elected as a Senator of Malaysia from 1959 to 1969 (representing Perak's Malaysian Chinese Association), the Chairman of the Perak Bar Association, and the founder of "Sri Maju" in 1975, a major intercity coach service in Malaysia and Singapore.

Though of Hokkien and Cantonese ancestry, she grew up speaking English to her father and could understand some Malaysian Cantonese from her maternal grandmother who lived with them.

Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng (born Yeoh Choo Kheng; ; 6 August 1962) is a Malaysian actress.

Yeoh was born on 6 August 1962 in Ipoh, Perak, to Janet Yeoh (born 1937) and Yeoh Kian-teik (1926–2014).

She learned to speak Cantonese fluently in the 1980s and some Mandarin in the 2000s.

Despite that, she never learned to read or write Chinese, which she has said was her greatest regret.

Yeoh was keen on dance from an early age, beginning ballet at age four.

She studied at Main Convent Ipoh, an all-girls secondary school, as a primary student.

At age 15, she moved with her parents to the United Kingdom.

There, she was enrolled in The Hammond School, Chester, where she started to train as a ballet dancer.

However, a spinal injury prevented her from becoming a professional ballet dancer, and she shifted her attention to choreography and other arts.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1983.

In 1983, twenty-year-old Yeoh won the Miss Malaysia World contest.

She was Malaysia's representative at the Miss World 1983 pageant in London, where she placed eighteenth.

Later that year, she traveled to Australia where she won the 1984 Miss Moomba International pageant.

Her first acting work was in a television commercial for Guy Laroche watches with Jackie Chan.

This caught the attention of a fledgling Hong Kong film production company, D&B Films.

Although she had a passive understanding of the Ipoh Cantonese spoken in her hometown, she could not speak it.

During a phone call in Cantonese, she was offered to co-star in a television commercial with a Sing Long, and only realized that was Jackie Chan's Cantonese name when she arrived in the studio.

She learned to speak Cantonese as she began her career in Hong Kong.

Yeoh began her acting career in action and martial arts films, in which she performed her own stunts.

These roles include Yes, Madam (1985); Magnificent Warriors (1987); Police Story 3: Supercop (1992); The Heroic Trio (1993); and Holy Weapon (1993).

Yeoh's first lead role came in her third film, Yes, Madam (1985).

Yeoh initially used the pseudonym Michelle Khan, a stage name selected by D&B Films for its potential appeal to international and Western audiences.

In 1987, Yeoh married her first husband Dickson Poon, a co-founder of D&B Films, and decided to retire from acting.

Credited as Michelle Khan in her early films in Hong Kong, she rose to fame in the 1990s after starring in Hong Kong action films where she performed her own stunts.

After five years of marriage, Yeoh divorced Poon and returned to acting with Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992).

She appeared in The Heroic Trio (1993), and the Yuen Woo-ping films Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun in 1993 and 1994, respectively.

After moving to the United States, Yeoh gained international recognition for starring in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and in Ang Lee's martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), the latter for which she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

In 1997, she was chosen by People as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World", and in 2009 the same magazine listed her as one of the "35 All-Time Screen Beauties".

In 2022, Time named her one of the world's 100 most influential people on its annual listicle and its Icon of the Year.

She changed her stage name back to Michelle Yeoh when she started her Hollywood career with Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997.

In the 1997 James Bond film, she played Wai Lin opposite star Pierce Brosnan.

Brosnan was impressed, describing her as a "wonderful actress" who was "serious and committed about her work".

He referred to her as a "female James Bond" in reference to her combat abilities.

Her Hollywood career progressed with roles in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), Reign of Assassins (2010), Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011), and The Lady (2011), in which she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi.

The film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes ranked her the greatest action heroine of all time in 2008.

Yeoh played supporting roles in the romantic comedies Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Last Christmas (2019), as well as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the television series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2020).

For her starring role as Evelyn Wang, an overwhelmed matriarch navigating the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), she received the best critic's notices of her career and won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Asian to win the category, and the first Malaysian to win an Academy Award.

She has since starred in the action comedy series The Brothers Sun (2024).