Michelle Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once, becoming the first Asian winner of the category. It capped a career of more than four decades that began with her doing her own stunts in Hong Kong action films and later took her into James Bond, Marvel, Star Trek and Wicked.
From Ipoh to Hong Kong
Yeoh was born on August 6, 1962, in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia. Her father, Dato’ Yeoh Kian-teik, was a politician who served as a Malaysian senator from 1959 to 1969 and founded the Sri Maju coach service. She began ballet at four and moved with her parents to England at fifteen, training at The Hammond School in Chester. A spinal injury ended any hope of dancing professionally, so she turned to choreography. She earned a degree from Crewe + Alsager College of Higher Education in 1983.
That same year she won Miss Malaysia World and placed eighteenth at Miss World in London, then took the 1984 Miss Moomba International title in Australia. A watch commercial with Jackie Chan led to an offer from the Hong Kong company D&B Films. She had only a passive grasp of Cantonese and learned to speak it, and later Mandarin, on the job. She never learned to read or write Chinese characters, which she has called her greatest regret.
Billed as Michelle Khan, a name D&B chose for its appeal abroad, she landed her first lead in her third film, Yes, Madam (1985). In 1987 she married D&B co-founder Dickson Poon and stepped away from acting. After five years the marriage ended, and she came back with Police Story 3: Supercop (1992), followed by The Heroic Trio and Tai Chi Master (both 1993) and Wing Chun (1994).
Crossing over
She returned to the name Michelle Yeoh for Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), where she played Wai Lin opposite Pierce Brosnan. The director thought the stunts too dangerous for her, yet she performed all her own fight scenes. Brosnan called her a “female James Bond.” Ang Lee then cast her in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), her first Mandarin-language martial arts film. She learned the lines phonetically. The film was an international success and brought her a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
She produced her first English-language film, The Touch, in 2002 through her company Mythical Films. In 2004 she met the motor racing executive Jean Todt at a Ferrari event in Shanghai, and they became engaged that year. Hollywood work followed: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). She kept working in Chinese-language cinema too, in True Legend and Reign of Assassins (both 2010).
In 2011 she played Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s The Lady. The Burmese government reportedly blacklisted her over the role, and she was refused entry to Myanmar and deported on June 22, 2011. That October Guerlain named her its skincare ambassador, partly to strengthen the company’s ties with Asia.
Television and a second act
Yeoh did not do television until 2015, in the fifth season of Strike Back. In 2016 she was cast as Captain Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery, and returned later as the character’s mirror double. A spin-off film, Star Trek: Section 31, was ordered by Paramount+.
In 2018 she played the matriarch Eleanor Young in Crazy Rich Asians. The next year she appeared in Last Christmas, which grossed over $121 million worldwide. In 2021 she played Ying Nan in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, released in March 2022, cast her as Evelyn Quan Wang, a struggling laundromat owner. The role brought a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, an Independent Spirit Award and the Oscar. She was the first Malaysian to be nominated for and win an Academy Award, and the first Asian woman to win a lead film category at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Time named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2022. In 2023 she joined the International Olympic Committee after a vote at a ceremony in Mumbai, and starred in A Haunting in Venice and the Disney+ series American Born Chinese. She led the Netflix series The Brothers Sun in January 2024 and played Madame Morrible in Wicked, released in November 2024, with a sequel the following year. In 2024 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Berlinale organisers announced in November 2025 that she would receive a lifetime achievement award at the festival the following year.
