Her teenage dreams of becoming a ballerina were dashed – but now, in her 60s, the actress is winning Oscars and starring in this year’s blockbuster film.
When Jon M. Chu – who had directed Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians – asked the actress to be in his new film, she had just one reservation. “I read the script and said, ‘Jon, you know I don’t sing.’”
The film was Wicked, based on the multi-Tony-winning musical about two witches, Glinda and Elphaba, one good and one green. Chu already had his trainee witches: Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. He wanted Yeoh for Madame Morrible, their magic teacher.
“The next thing I received was this video call with Jon, Ariana and Cynthia,” Yeoh tells me over Zoom from Prague, where she is filming the Blade Runner 2099 series for Amazon Prime. “And the three of them are going, ‘It’s imperative that you come and join us now!’” Yeoh had never seen the musical but relented to the irresistible force of the trio and was soon travelling to Oz (aka Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire) to perform duets with Erivo, a Grammy-winning singer. “They were very loving and encouraging,” Yeoh says. “They found me an amazing voice coach. Cynthia was like, ‘Don’t be shy, you can do it.’”
It’s hard to believe there is anything Michelle Yeoh can’t do. Her career is as wildly impressive and multi-dimensional as Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film for which she won the best actress Oscar in 2023 – the first Asian woman to do so. In her acceptance speech she said: “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities.” It had the audience in tears.
Yeoh, 62, was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, a mining town surrounded by mountains. Her father was a lawyer and politician and her mother was full of ambition for her daughter. The plan was that Yeoh would be a ballerina. She had lessons from the age of 4 and was 15 when she travelled to England, by herself, to attend a ballet school in Chester. “It was the greatest joy. I was dancing from nine to five every day,” she says.
However, just before she turned 17 spinal problems meant she had to abandon dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. Instead, she did a creative arts degree at Crewe and Alsager College (now part of Manchester Metropolitan University), thinking she might run a ballet school. But her mother had other ideas. “When I went home I discovered she had entered me into the Miss Malaysia competition.”
Janet Yeoh had form: she had been sending photos of her daughter to magazines for years. “She is the one who should have been the movie star,” Yeoh says. “She’s a real diva. She is so glamorous and loves attention. She looks at me and goes, ‘Why don’t you put on some make-up? Why don’t you wear a dress?’ So we came to an agreement – I said, ‘I will do this for you and then you will leave me in peace.’” But peace was not on the agenda – Yeoh won Miss World Malaysia and spent a year “in a flurry of dresses”.
Not long afterwards she came to the attention of Dickson Poon, a Hong Kong businessman with a portfolio of luxury brands, which now includes Harvey Nichols. He was looking for someone to be in a Guy Laroche advertisement with the actor Jackie Chan. “My friend showed him my picture and he asked if I was interested in coming to Hong Kong. I was like, what have I got to lose? I packed my bags and met with Dickson. The next thing I knew we were shooting the commercial,” she says, laughing at the madness of it all.
Yeoh has a charming, irrepressible kinetic energy. She is constantly in motion, picking up her laptop to show me the view of Prague from the window, cleaning her glasses, fiddling with the script on the desk in front of her. She might be a Buddhist but she is not very good at meditation. “I have been trying to learn. There is this amazing meditation that [the actor and martial artist] Jet Li taught me. You can be anywhere, it can be for a minute, you just have to take a breath.”
Yeoh doesn’t dwell on the past, about what might have been, she is all about positivity and possibility. And in Hong Kong, aged 22, having just met the unexpectedly young and handsome Poon, who also happened to be starting a film-making business, that meant becoming an actress. Her first role was as a teacher at a juvenile reform centre. “A damsel in distress was what they wanted me to play. It was the 1980s, a man’s world. The guys had to come and protect me. But I watched the action, the fighting, and I thought, this is like dance, everyone is just learning moves, it’s choreographed. So I turned to Dickson and said, ‘I would really like to try martial arts.’ All the guys laughed and said, ‘She doesn’t know what she is asking for.’”
Yeoh may not have had martial arts lessons as a child (those had been for her brother), but she had been a junior squash champion, a diver, a swimmer, a runner. To this day she wakes up two hours early so she can do an hour of cardio followed by a weights session. “I was not just graceful, I had power too. And I felt like I had to stand up for myself.” So she set to work, spending all day in the gym, learning how to be an on-screen martial arts star. She became famous as a fearless action woman. “After I did my first action movie, Yes, Madam!, when I played a cop, I had so many women come up to me saying, ‘Yes! We have to show our men, we don’t want to be better than them, we just want to be treated as equals.’”
Meanwhile, Yeoh and Poon had started a relationship and in 1988 got married, an extravagant society event with a vast, six-tier cake. Yeoh, who had pushed herself so hard to counteract gender norms on screen, retired from her career to concentrate on her marriage. “It was my choice. I felt that if I wanted this to work I had to give it my all. I’d had a good career, a good run of what I was doing. I was in a very good place and that is the time when you decide what is important. I really wanted to start a family.”
During their three years of marriage, it transpired that Yeoh was unable to have children. She knew her husband wanted a family, so the couple agreed to divorce. The decision was amicable and Yeoh remains close to Poon and his family – she is godmother to his eldest daughter with his first wife. “Maybe that is the biggest sadness in my life, that I cannot have kids,” she says. “But the beauty is that I have six godchildren, many nephews and nieces. I don’t live with regrets because I have always given it my 110%. I did everything to make it work, and sometimes even that is not enough, you have to be able …” she pauses, and then lifts her arms into a protective position, fists clenched. “In life we say, you have to not go around holding your hands like this, you have to learn to let go, and sometimes letting go helps you move forward.”
Even during her marriage Yeoh continued with martial arts training, working with the stunt choreographer Stanley Tong, and when she resumed her career in 1992 it was in a film he directed, Police Story 3: Supercop, in which Yeoh performed terrifying stunts, like riding a motorbike on to a moving train, having never driven a bike before. “Jackie Chan said to me, ‘If you do any more of your own stunts, I am going to die.’ Because he is Jackie Chan, so if I jump from a motorcycle, he has to jump from a helicopter.”
It was these sorts of roles that got the attention of Barbara Broccoli, who was looking for an actress to star opposite Pierce Brosnan, not so much as Bond’s girl but as Bond’s equal. “The producers understood that Bond had to evolve, that women are more than a pretty face and a funny name.” Yeoh appeared as a Chinese secret agent in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). It was her introduction to mainstream Western audiences and she wowed with her charisma and physical prowess, but she was disappointed by the types of parts she was offered subsequently. “At the time there were not many roles that were written for an Asian woman, and every time they wrote a role like that they had to justify why was this Asian woman suddenly reporting the news, she should be in Chinatown.”
Yeoh turned down many roles, not wanting to perpetuate a cliché. It was two years before she worked on another film, and that film was the extraordinary Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “Ang Lee [the movie’s director] said to me, ‘I want to do Sense and Sensibility but with martial arts,’ and I was like, ‘Just tell me when.’”
The film was a huge international success and led to more nuanced roles in movies like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Lady, in which Yeoh played the Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi. By this time she had met Jean Todt, then the CEO of Ferrari. Within two months of being introduced in 2004 he had proposed, although the couple only got married in summer 2023: a town hall wedding in Geneva, with a dinner afterwards at which Yeoh wore a dress designed for her by Schiaparelli, followed by celebrations in Hong Kong and Malaysia – “Of course, my mother had more dress changes than I did!”
The couple’s primary base is their home in Geneva, close to Todt’s son Nicolas, who this January had a baby – Yeoh’s grandson. “He is so cute. I was talking to him earlier on FaceTime and his dad said he was hugging the phone.” When she is not with her grandson at home in Geneva, Yeoh likes hiking in the surrounding mountains. She is healthy, what with all the exercise, but does not believe in abstinence. “I love my red wine, I love my champagne. I work hard, so I am going to treat myself,” she says. This year she was made the face of Helena Rubinstein and is making full use of the association. “From the minute I wake up when I clean my face I put on the eye pads, the creams, I do at least two masks every day.” She is also a brand ambassador for Bottega Veneta – “they have some of the best leather things, very wearable” – and Balenciaga. When we talk she is in her uniform of white Balenciaga polo neck and jeans, and is wearing what looks like no make-up, her complexion a testament to the daily-double-facemask and champagne lifestyle, but also to her positive outlook.
Yeoh talks a lot about luck, about all the doors that have opened for her: change was happening anyway and she was in the right place at the right time. But I suggest that she has been part of effecting that change, in how we see women on screen, in how we see Asian women on screen, in how we see older people on screen, and therefore more widely in the world. “I think it’s fair to say that,” she replies. “I do believe luck plays a part. There are more talented people. But the harder you work the luckier you get, because then, when that opportunity comes, you’re not floundering. You need to cultivate yourself, learn as much as you can, be prepared, so that when the window opens you can dive straight through and be the one.”
Wicked is out in cinemas now
Written by: Gavanndra Hodge
© The Times of London