Life Power List 2023: Michelle Yeoh in her prime at 60
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Actress Michelle Yeoh, who won Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), has caught a second wind in her career.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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SINGAPORE – Michelle Yeoh entered 2023 with spicy sarcasm worthy of the steely matriarchs she has come to portray.
At the Golden Globes Awards ceremony
“Hollywood was a dream come true, until I got here,” she said in her Best Actress acceptance speech.
“Someone said, ‘You speak English.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, the flight over here was 13 hours long, so I learnt,’” said the actress, as she picked up the accolade for starring in the comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Yeoh has been famous in Asia since the 1980s, when the Malaysian broke into the Hong Kong film industry to become one of its biggest action stars.
After a scene-stealing turn as a Chinese operative in the James Bond thriller Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Hollywood came calling – but only when it needed her to be the stereotypical Asian sexpot. She shot down every offer, cooling off her career in the West.
Then came Taiwanese film-maker Lee Ang’s martial arts fantasy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The Oscar-winning film was not just a box-office hit, but was also a cultural phenomenon.
Yeoh earned visibility in the West, but was still mostly called on to play the exotic foreigner in movies such as the period drama Memoirs Of A Geisha (2005).
Now and then, she would get a well-received dramatic role, such as that in the science-fiction drama Sunshine (2007), where she played an astronaut. Because the films failed to ignite the box office, she mostly stayed in supporting roles, in the genres of martial arts or action.
Her fortunes changed when the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018) earned more than US$230 million globally. Its success made Hollywood sit up. It laid to rest the rule that said Asians were not bankable. On the back of her role as dowager Eleanor Young, Yeoh’s career caught a second wind.
When Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan became unavailable to play an immigrant laundry shop boss in an action-comedy produced by independent studio A24, its directors changed the gender of the character and gave the part to Yeoh.
Her “yes” would help take Everything Everywhere All At Once to the 2023 Oscars, where it earned seven awards, including Best Actress for Yeoh.
Four decades into her career, the 60-year-old made an Oscar acceptance speech about her age and being a racial minority.
“For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities. This is proof that dreams do come true. And ladies, don’t let anybody tell you that you are past your prime. Never give up.”
She is living up to her words about being in her prime.
ST ILLUSTRATION: CEL GULAPA
After three seasons in a supporting role as Starfleet Captain Philippa Georgiou in the science-fiction series Star Trek: Discovery (2017 to present), she has earned enough fan support to warrant a series centred on her character in Star Trek: Section 31, set to debut in 2025.
But before that show debuts, she will be seen in the 2024 Netflix action-comedy series The Brothers Sun, in which she plays a crime family matriarch based in Los Angeles.
From 2024 to 2031, fans will see her as scientist Karina Mogue in the third to fifth movies of the Avatar franchise.
Eight years from now, as the fifth Avatar movie lands, there is little doubt that if she were to take the awards podium again, she will be as outspoken as she has been in 2023.
