The secret to Michelle Yeoh's success

IN JUST a few more hours, we will know whether Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh, the pride of Malaysia, has won the Oscar for Best Actress in Everything Everywhere All At Once (EEAAO). All signs seem to point that way and it would indeed be the biggest feather in her already heavily decorated cap.

If she does win, and goes down in Hollywood’s history as the first Asian actress to do so, how did she achieve what so many others tried but failed to do? After all, Asian actors and actresses have been trying to break into Hollywood for the longest time. No matter how successful they are in their own countries or even in the whole of Asia, that is the Holy Grail to reach for.

A prerequisite to do so is the ability to speak English and memorable Chinese actresses who learned the language and got roles in Hollywood include Gong Li, Joan Chen, Li Bing Bing and Tang Wei. Among Indian actresses, we have Aishwarya Rai, Padma Lakshmi, Deepika Padukone and of course Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

As for Asian actors, many Indian legends have been featured in Western movies like Irrfan Khan, Anil Kapoor and Om Puri. (Interestingly, Bollywood’s biggest star Shah Rukh Khan has never made a Hollywood movie).

Among East Asian actors, we have the likes of South Korea’s Lee Byung-hun and Rain, Japan’s Ken Watanabe and Dean Fujioka, Hong Kong’s Tony Leung and Chow Yun Fat.

All of the above-named are highly talented dramatic actors and actresses but the fact is there are plenty of such homegrown non-white actors in Hollywood already. Although there have been big budget Asian-centric films in English like The Joy Luck Club, Gandhi, Slumdog Millionaire, Mulan and Crazy Rich Asians, these are really few and far in between. It remains to be seen whether EEAAO will change that.

Yeoh’s English language fluency indeed helped her break into Hollywood. She is typical of her generation of Malaysians born in the 1960s. While they learned Malay as the national language in school and most spoke a Chinese dialect at home - in her case it’s Cantonese – their default language is English whether in reading, writing or speaking. As she is not Mandarin literate, she had to memorise her lines by rote.

That, however, is not really a problem in the Chinese film industry where it is a common practice to dub even China-born actors in films and dramas with professional voice actors to ensure good delivery and consistency in pronunciation and accent.

Probably the only time Yeoh was not dubbed was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

English skills apart, it was her ability to do death defying martial arts stunts that brought her to the attention of the James Bond franchise producers who wanted a different type of Bond girl in the 1997 Tomorrow Never Dies.

She is the only female artiste in that rare pool of Chinese actors famed for their martial arts ability that can be traced back to Bruce Lee comprising Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Donnie Yen who have become global household names.

That is how these men won over Hollywood and Western audiences despite their less than fluent command of the English language. Chan, in particular, is adored because he mixes his kung fu stunts with comedy that allows audiences to overlook his quirky English.

Another famous Hong Kong martial artist actor, Sammo Hung, tried to get a shot at Hollywood in the late 1990s but failed because he couldn’t speak English fluently. Chow Yun Fat also faltered for the same reason despite being called "the coolest actor in the world" by the Los Angeles Times in 2011.

Enter Yeoh whose first love was ballet and only dreamed of opening her own school for kids and never imagined an acting career.

We have her mum, Janet Yeoh, to thank for signing her up for the Miss Malaysia pageant in 1983 that led her to Hong Kong and acting.

As she has recounted many times, she was initially cast as the belle in distress in her early films. When she noticed that fight scenes were highly choreographed like dance, she drew on her ballet background and trained hard to do her own stunts that won the respect of her peers in the male-dominated action film genre.

In her four decades long career, she has built up a truly impressive body of work in film and TV dramas comprising different genres in both Chinese and English. She worked hard to break from her action heroine mould with dramatic roles in Memoirs of a Geisha; sci-fi thriller Sunshine; indie film Far North shot in harsh arctic Norway, in which she played an ostracised Lapp woman; Babylon AD; Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady; and Star Trek: Discovery.

Still, she would first and foremost be remembered and revered as an action star for her iconic roles in Yes, Madam, Police Story 3: Super Cop and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with the kung fu-loving international audience.

Even without EEAAO, Yeoh is already a superstar but that film provided her with the perfect platform to play the unlikely middle-aged heroine with multiple lives in many universes who can really kick ass. It was everything we would want from Yeoh and it is absolutely true only she could have played Evelyn Wang, even if the role was originally written for Jackie Chan.

That said, the film with its martial arts and comedy elements would have been just business as usual for Chan and the consensus is that directing duo Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan made the right choice to flip the gender for Yeoh to play the lead.

With EEAAO’s supercharged success and awards galore, Western media can’t get enough of Yeoh. Just about every talk show host from Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert to Graham Norton wants her as a guest.

And it’s easy to see why. Yeoh is articulate, witty, charming, funny and plain smart. Her host doesn’t have to provide a translator, stick to simple questions and expect short prepared answers.

When veteran South Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2021, she too was able to give her acceptance speech and take interviews in English, thanks to the years she lived in the United States but she was nowhere as comfortable and confident as Yeoh.

Yeoh is truly a unique one-of-a-kind "product" of two countries: Malaysia that gave her the English language advantage and ballet background and Hong Kong that trained her as an action star and honed as a dramatic actress.

Arguably at present, no actress, white and non-white, can equal her in her stature. Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft? Lucy Liu and co as Charlie’s Angels? Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman? They can’t even touch her last toe.

Her fearlessness in tackling many of her stunts, like in Police Story 3 that was shot in Malaysia, which could have crippled or killed her is simply beyond belief. And she is still at it at 60!

It took Yeoh 40 years to get where she is today and in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards, she knew exactly what to say in keeping with her tough as nails image.

When they tried to cut her off, she said: "Shut up please. I can beat you up, ok? And that’s serious."

And the crowd laughed and cheered at their warrior queen of action who could tell anyone off in perfect English.