Word: yeoh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After a dozen years as the exemplary flying-fisted female of Hong Kong films, Yeoh (also known as Michelle Kahn) is getting the Hollywood treatment, and not just at her fingertips. Quentin Tarantino has literally knelt at her feet, quizzing her adoringly about her films. Oliver Stone calls Yeoh "a woman of elegance and magnificent grace--the young grande dame of Hong Kong cinema." And there's a big retrospective of Yeoh's films (which can also be found in specialty video stores) this week and next at New York City's Cinema Village Theatre. But the actress is getting...
...wouldn't guess from her easy assurance that no Asian actress has ever become a star in big-time films in the West. But Yeoh, 34, has always known how to handle herself. Consider the first scene in her first starring role, as a Hong Kong cop in the 1985 Yes, Madam: she walks into a library and, when a man exposes himself, slams a fat book shut on his offending member. She is a master of lightning kicks, splits and somersaults; she's also handy with firearms. A little Diaghilev, a little Dirty Harry...
...looks as if she'd been born to it, or had been indentured to the Peking Opera School as a kid. Not so: Yeoh was born to dance. Raised in Malaysia by her ethnic-Chinese, English-speaking parents, Michelle pursued a dance career. She earned a B.A. at London's Royal Academy of Dance and returned home to be crowned Miss Malaysia of 1983. A year later she was starring in movies...
After four starring roles, Yeoh wed Dickson Poon, her patron at D&B Films, and, at 25, retired from acting. The marriage ended four years later, and Chan quickly offered her a part as his kick-butt co-star in Super Cop. In some later roles she got to play ultra-glam goddesses, her long hair caressed by a brisk wind even when she's indoors. Typically, though, she was cast as the superwoman who not only fights like a man but also is mistaken for one. "I don't treat myself like a woman," she tells a suitor...
...doing gorgeous stunts in such terrific films as The Heroic Trio, Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun, and suffered torn ligaments, cracked ribs, jangled neck vertebrae and a dislocated shoulder. She was seriously injured in 1995, while shooting Ah Kam. "It wasn't one of my difficult stunts," Yeoh says blithely, "just jumping off an 18-ft. wall. I landed on my head, and my neck went crack! Every muscle, every ligament in my body was screaming. At the hospital they put me in cement to keep me immobile." A month later, she was filming again...