Michelle Yeoh

From ballet to action films

Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng was born on 6 August 1962 in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia. She started ballet at four. At 15 she moved to England with her parents and enrolled at the Hammond School in Chester to train as a dancer. A spinal injury ended that plan; she switched to choreography and graduated in 1983. The same year she was crowned Miss Malaysia.

She never had formal martial arts training. Her foundation is dance: flexibility, balance and the ability to memorise sequences. She learned martial arts on set, from Hong Kong's fight choreographers and stunt teams.

The D&B Films years

Her first screen job was a watch commercial with Jackie Chan. It caught the eye of D&B Films, a new Hong Kong studio, which launched her as Michelle Khan. Her first lead came in Yes, Madam (1985), a Corey Yuen cop film in which she teams up with American Cynthia Rothrock. She prepared by training eight hours a day in the gym and did as many of her own stunts as she could.

Royal Warriors (1986) followed, during which a co-star's kick dislocated her shoulder, then Magnificent Warriors (1987), where she wields a whip. She stepped away after marrying D&B co-founder Dickson Poon and came back in 1992.

The comeback was opposite Jackie Chan in Stanley Tong's Supercop (1992), in which she jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train. Then came Johnnie To's The Heroic Trio (1993) with Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung, and two Yuen Woo-ping films: Tai Chi Master with Jet Li, and Wing Chun (1994), where she plays Yim Wing-chun, the woman said to have given the style its name, opposite Donnie Yen. On The Stunt Woman (1996), a jump of more than five metres from a bridge onto a truck went wrong: she landed on her head and spent a month in traction.

Hollywood and Crouching Tiger

For Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) she went back to her real name. She plays Wai Lin, a Chinese agent who teams up with James Bond (Pierce Brosnan). Director Roger Spottiswoode banned the riskiest stunts, but she still performed all her own fights.

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) cast her as Yu Shu Lien, a warrior who hides her feelings for Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat). She did not yet speak Mandarin and learned her lines phonetically. During the shoot she tore a knee ligament; after surgery she was off set for three months. Her duel with Zhang Ziyi, in which she switches weapons with every exchange, is one of the film's best-known scenes. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress.

A widening career

She has since moved between Hollywood and Asian cinema: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007), Reign of Assassins (2010), co-directed by John Woo, The Lady (2011), as Aung San Suu Kyi, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (2018) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), where she teaches the hero a flowing, circular style. On television she played Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) gave her the fullest role of her career: Evelyn Wang, a laundromat owner who finds her fighting skills in other universes. She again did part of her own action, including a fight on a narrow staircase with Jamie Lee Curtis. The part won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy and, in March 2023, the Oscar for Best Actress, the first for an Asian actress. She then played Madame Morrible in Wicked (2024) and its sequel (2025). France made her a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 2017, and the Berlin festival gave her an honorary Golden Bear in 2026.