Michelle Yeoh

A dancer first

Michelle Yeoh grew up in Ipoh, Malaysia, and moved to London as a teenager to study ballet at the Royal Academy of Dance. A back injury ended her hopes of a ballet career, but the strength, balance and discipline of dance stayed with her. After she was crowned Miss Malaysia in 1983, she appeared in a television commercial alongside Jackie Chan that led to film offers in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong action star

Yeoh signed with the Hong Kong company D and B Films and starred in Yes, Madam (1985). She had no martial arts training, so she learned on the job, using her dance background, and insisted on doing her own stunts. In Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) she matched Jackie Chan stunt for stunt, including riding a motorbike onto a moving train.

Going global

Yeoh reached international audiences in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) followed, with graceful wire-work duels among the treetops; it became the most successful foreign-language film in US history at the time. Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) kept her in the spotlight.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

In the 2022 film by the directing duo Daniels, Yeoh played Evelyn, a laundromat owner who leaps between countless versions of her own life. The role used every skill she had: comedy, drama and action. At the Academy Awards in March 2023 she won Best Actress, the first Asian winner of the category, and the film won seven Oscars including Best Picture.

What came next

Yeoh went on to play Madame Morrible in the musical films Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025). Her journey from dance student to Oscar winner is one of the great late-career triumphs. For her old co-star's own story, read our Jackie Chan page.

Where to start

Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) shows her fearless stunt work, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) shows her grace and stillness in a sweeping martial arts drama. Crazy Rich Asians (2018) shows her quiet authority as a demanding matriarch, and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) puts all of it together in one wild, funny and moving film.

Did you know? Yeoh has said she learned Mandarin dialogue phonetically for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, because she grew up speaking English, Malay and Cantonese.

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