Michelle Yeoh

Yeoh Choo Kheng (Chinese: 楊紫瓊; born 6 August 1962), known professionally as Michelle Yeoh (/joʊ/ YOH), is a Malaysian actress. In a career spanning over four decades, she has acted in film and television productions covering a wide range of genres and received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, along with nominations for two British Academy Film Awards. Credited as Michelle Khan in her early films, she rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s after starring in Hong Kong action and martial arts films where she performed her own stunts. These roles included Yes, Madam (1985); Magnificent Warriors (1987); Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992); The Heroic Trio and Tai Chi Master (both 1993); and Wing Chun (1994).

After moving to the United States, Yeoh gained international recognition for her starring roles in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and in Ang Lee's wuxia martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); the latter earned her a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her Hollywood career progressed with roles in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). She continued to appear in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, starring in True Legend and Reign of Assassins (both 2010); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016); and Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (2018). In 2011, she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi in the British biographical film The Lady (2011).

Yeoh played supporting roles in the romantic comedies Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Last Christmas (2019), as well as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the television series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2020). Her voice acting work has included Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011); Minions: The Rise of Gru and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (both 2022); Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023); and The Tiger's Apprentice (2024). For her starring role as Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Asian to win the category, and the first Malaysian to win an Academy Award. She has since featured in the mystery film A Haunting in Venice (2023) and the musical fantasy films Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025).

The film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes ranked her the greatest action heroine of all time in 2008. In 1997, she was chosen by People as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World", and in 2009 the same magazine listed her as one of the "35 All-Time Screen Beauties". In 2022, Time named her one of the world's 100 most influential people on its annual listicle and its Icon of the Year. In 2024, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Yeoh was born on 6 August 1962 in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, to Janet Yeoh and Yeoh Kian-teik. Her father was elected as a Senator of Malaysia from 1959 to 1969 as a member of Perak's Malaysian Chinese Association, the Chairman of the Perak Bar Association,^[when?] and the founder of "Sri Maju" in 1975, a major intercity coach service in Malaysia and Singapore. Of Hokkien and Cantonese ancestry, she grew up speaking English to her father, and could understand some Malaysian Cantonese from her maternal grandmother who lived with them. She learned to speak Cantonese and Mandarin fluently in the 1980s and 1990s after starting her career in Hong Kong. Despite that, she never learned to read or write Chinese characters, which she has said was her greatest regret.

Yeoh was keen on dance from an early age, beginning ballet at age four. She went to the girls school Main Convent Ipoh. At age fifteen, she moved with her parents to England. There, she was enrolled in The Hammond School, Chester, where she started to train as a ballet dancer. However, a spinal injury prevented her from becoming a professional ballet dancer, and she shifted her attention to choreography and other arts. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Crewe + Alsager College of Higher Education in 1983.

In 1983, twenty-year-old Yeoh won the Miss Malaysia World beauty contest. She was Malaysia's representative at the Miss World 1983 pageant in London, where she placed eighteenth. Later that year, she traveled to Australia where she won the 1984 Miss Moomba International pageant. Her first acting work was in a television commercial for Guy Laroche watches with Jackie Chan. This caught the attention of a fledgling Hong Kong film production company, D&B Films. Although she had a passive understanding of the Ipoh Cantonese spoken in her hometown, she could not speak it. During a phone call in Cantonese, she was offered to co-star in a television commercial with a Sing Long, and only realised that was Chan's Cantonese name when she arrived in the studio. She learned to speak Cantonese as she began her career in Hong Kong.

Yeoh began her acting career in action and martial arts films, in which she performed her own stunts. Yeoh's first lead role came in her third film, Yes, Madam (1985). Yeoh initially used the pseudonym Michelle Khan, a stage name selected by D&B Films for its potential appeal to international and Western audiences. In 1987, Yeoh married her first husband Dickson Poon, a co-founder of D&B Films, and decided to retire from acting.