Michelle Yeoh

Ahead of her nominations at the BAFTAs and the Oscars, we take a look back at the jaw-dropping action films that earned Michelle Yeoh a reputation for grace ...

All the stunts were real, and performed by the actors – resulting in a number of close shaves (Yeoh is observed falling from a car into oncoming traffic in an outtakes reel that plays over the credits). It would be a few years yet before he achieved international prominence via Hong Kong gangster classics like Election and Exiled, but the urban martial fantasy The Heroic Trio would offer a glimpse of his talent in the early 90s. The stakes then get immediately higher on the way home to Hong Kong, as Yeoh finds herself in the midst of a terrorist incident on the plane involving guns, grenades and a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure. The plot: more than half of the drug circulation in south-east Asia has been traced to a single kingpin, who must be stopped at all costs! All the while, Yeoh’s star was rising – and her next film was able to secure a larger budget for an even loftier spectacle shortly after. In the 1980s, she’d emerge as a dynamic lead in a string of jaw-dropping action films that earned her a reputation for grace and gravitas. A spaghetti-western-tinged action-adventure set in dusty 1930s China, it finds Yeoh’s secret agent sporting a brown leather jacket and cracking a whip just like Harrison Ford – as the villainous Japanese are brought down by her exploits. With no prior training in martial arts, Yeoh committed to working out eight hours a day at the gym to prepare for the role – and, watching Yes, Madam, you can see why she’d be cast as a Bond girl a decade later. Two years after winning the Miss World Malaysia beauty contest as a 20-year-old, Yeoh was cast as the lead in what would be her third feature film role in 1985. Yeoh was born in a former tin-mining town in western Malaysia in 1962, and moved to England to study ballet at 16. After winning the Miss World Malaysia contest in 1983, Yeoh was invited to appear in a On the 24th January 2023, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting – for her leading role in the parallel universe indie sensation Everything Everywhere All at Once.