(2 of 2)
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 in Butterfly & Sword. "Don't you treat me like one either."
She has worked like a man, like a dog, 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.
That kind of grit will serve Yeoh well as she tries to become an Asian leading lady in Hollywood. "The most important thing," she insists, "is to start. Already, you can see minds changing. They're not thinking so much in colors: white, black, Asian. They also recognize that the world market includes Asia--and that's a very big market out there. The curtain is going up, and now we're finally going to be able to have a good show."
It will be a great show indeed if Michelle Yeoh is at the center of a Hollywood movie. That would be the toughest stunt any Hong Kong actress has pulled off.
--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles