Asia's top female action star is new in Los Angeles, but already the locals know her as the woman who matched Jackie Chan stunt for impossible stunt in Police Story III: Super Cop. And maybe they think that punishing her body for film art--by, say, leaping off the top of a runaway truck to land splat! on the hood of Chan's speeding convertible--is all Michelle Yeoh does. She recalls that on one of her first L.A. photo shoots, "The beautician told me, 'You know, for a stuntwoman you have gorgeous nails.' Well, thank you, but I'm an actress who just happens to enjoy doing my own stunts. It'd be nice if people could see me for what I can do."
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 more than kudos; she's getting work. Yeoh (pronounced Yo) is now filming the new James Bond epic, Tomorrow Never Comes, as 007's partner. "I won't be a stereotyped Suzie Wong," she says proudly. "With this movie we're beginning a new generation of Bond girls."
You 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.
She 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.
"Before Yes, Madam," she says, "I didn't know any form of martial arts. But because I'd been dancing since I was four, I was active and limber. I also had a quick mind to pick up steps and stunts. I'd look and I'd copy." Putting her dance techniques in the service of movie surrealism, she executed entrechats so they'd puncture a bad guy's windpipe; in her plies, the knee went thwok! in a man's most vulnerable spot. "My stunt coordinators constantly tell me not to kick so high," she says. "It's not the height that matters; it's accuracy, power, speed."