page_title: Michelle Yeoh
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Michelle Yeoh / Career
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Michelle Yeoh au festival de Cannes
context_page_description: Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng, PSM is a Malaysian actress who rose to fame in 1990s Hong Kong action films and is best known internationally for her roles in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies and martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, along with recent international English films and series. She is credited as Michelle Khan in her early Hong Kong films.
  Born in Ipoh, Malaysia, she won the Miss Malaysia pageant of 1983 at the age of 20. She later achieved fame in the early 1990s after starring in a series of Hong Kong action films in which she performed her own stunts, such as Yes, Madam, Police Story 3: Supercop and Holy Weapon. She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
  She has appeared in many English, Mandarin and Cantonese language films. Her other works include Memoirs of a Geisha, Reign of Assassins, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, Star Trek: Discovery and The Lady, in which she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi. In 2018, she starred in the American romantic comedy-drama film, Crazy Rich Asians.
context_section_description: In 1983, at the age of 20, Yeoh won the Miss Malaysia beauty pageant. Later that year, she traveled to Australia where she won another pair of beauty pageants; "Queen of the Pacific" and "Miss Moomba". She was also Malaysia's representative at the Miss World 1983 pageant in London. From there, she appeared in a television commercial with Jackie Chan which caught the attention of a fledgling Hong Kong film production company, D&B Films.
  Yeoh started her film career acting in action and martial arts films, where she did most of her own stunts. Already with her third credit, Yes, Madam (1985), she was given a main role. She was credited as Michelle Khan in these earlier films. This alias was chosen by D&B studio who thought it might be more marketable to international and western audiences. She reverted to Yeoh when she started her Hollywood career with Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997. The D&B Group in Hong Kong was run by the businessman Dickson Poon. Yeoh married Poon in 1987 and retired from acting.
  Yeoh returned to acting with Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992) after having divorced Poon. She then appeared in The Heroic Trio (1993), and the Yuen Woo-ping films Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun in 1993 and 1994, respectively.
  In 1997 she was cast as Wai Lin in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Brosnan was impressed, describing her as a "wonderful actress" who was "serious and committed about her work". He referred to her as a "female James Bond" in reference to her combat abilities. She wanted to perform her own stunts but was prevented because director Roger Spottiswoode considered it too dangerous. Nevertheless, she performed all of her own fighting scenes. Yeoh was then recruited by Ang Lee to star as Yu Shu Lien in the Chinese language martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The film was shot in various provinces around China. Yeoh had grown up speaking English and Malay, before learning Cantonese. She spoke little Mandarin, and learned the Mandarin lines for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically. The film was an international success, and earned Yeoh a BAFTA 2000 nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
  In 2002, she produced her first English film, The Touch, through her own production company, Mythical Films. In 2005, Yeoh starred as the graceful Mameha in the film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, and she continued her English-language work in 2007 with Sunshine. In 2008, Michelle Yeoh also starred in fantasy action film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor with Brendan Fraser and Jet Li.
  In October 2011, she was chosen by Guerlain to be its skincare ambassador. Yeoh's role was to help strengthen the French cosmetics company's relationship with Asia.
  Apart from action films, she is famous for playing nationalists in two biopics. In 1997, she played Soong Ai-ling in the award-winning The Soong Sisters. In 2011, she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson's The Lady. Yeoh was blacklisted by the Burmese government allegedly because of her participation in The Lady; she was refused entry to Myanmar on 22 June 2011 and was deported on the same day.
  Yeoh did not branch out into television until 2015, with her first role playing Mei Foster, wife to the British Ambassador to Thailand, and who is secretly a North Korean spy named Li-Na, on the fifth season of the Cinemax/Sky series Strike Back. In 2016, Yeoh was cast as Federation Captain Philippa Georgiou of the starship USS Shenzhou in the series Star Trek: Discovery, and recurs as Georgiou's "mirror" doppelganger later in the story.
  In 2018, she played family matriarch Eleanor Young in Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians, a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan's book of the same name, opposite Constance Wu and Henry Golding. In 2019, she played Christmas themed-store owner "Santa" in Last Christmas, opposite Henry Golding and Emilia Clarke. The film was released on 8 November 2019, and was a box office success grossing over $121 million worldwide.
caption: Yeoh at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
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