An almost exhaustive guide to Michelle Yeoh’s early Hong Kong career

With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.

American audiences have been rediscovering Michelle Yeoh for decades. She was a Bond girl in 1997, a major face of the international phenomenon Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a scene-stealer in Star Trek: Discovery, the emotional core of Crazy Rich Asians, and a magical mentor in Marvel’s Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Yet it still felt like something of a breakthrough moment when she won the Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once last year—making her the first Malaysian to win an Academy Award and just the second woman of color to ever win Best Actress. 

At age 62, Yeoh is officially a global household name, a status she recently helped cement with a memorable supporting turn in Wicked. But for action film fans, she’s been an icon far longer than that. Long before she appeared on American TV kicking Conan O’Brien in the face, she’d already kicked ass in dozens of Hong Kong martial arts movies. And if you’re a newbie looking for a primer on the history of Hong Kong action cinema, you could learn a lot just by making your way through Yeoh’s early work. 

Before launching her Hollywood career with Tomorrow Never Dies, Michelle Yeoh appeared in 18 films over 13 years in Hong Kong, trying her hand at just about every subgenre of the region’s action filmmaking in the process and even inventing a few new ones too. Perhaps surprisingly, however, she’s never had any formal martial arts training. Instead, her background is in ballet, which she intended to pursue professionally before a spinal injury ended that dream early. She earned her bachelor’s degree instead and entered the pageant circuit, winning the Miss Malaysia World contest in 1983. That led to her first big break in the entertainment industry: a luxury watch commercial that co-starred Jackie Chan and just happened to be promoting a brand owned by a Hong Kong business magnate who’d just launched a film production company. (Dickson Poon, whom Yeoh would go on to marry for a spell.) 

It was a transformative time for Hong Kong cinema, which had been producing films since the Silent Era but became a filmmaking powerhouse in the early 1970s thanks to the breakout success of Bruce Lee and the “kung fu craze” that swept America. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Hong Kong had one of the largest motion picture industries in the world, much of it driven by martial arts films. And while it was male stars who tended to dominate this wave, Hong Kong historically had a better track record with female action leads than America. In fact, with her breakout role as a legendary swordswoman in the 1966 wuxia film Come Drink With Me, Cheng Pei-pei is often credited as being “cinema’s first female action hero.” 

I’m not enough of a Hong Kong film scholar to entirely account for the phenomenon. But I’d wager that it’s partially because China had a pre-existing tradition of female folk heroes in the wuxia genre and partially because Hong Kong cinema was originally dominated by female-led musicals and romances, with a stable of stars like Connie Chan Po-chu who might hop from a teen musical to a wuxia epic to the 007-inspired Lady Bond. There’s also something to be said for volume. Hong Kong churned out movies in a quick run-and-gun style, with troupes of directors, actors, and stunt teams who regularly work together and get most of their training on set. Coupled with an overall demand for more martial arts movies, that created an experimental environment where filmmakers weren’t so scared to put women front and center. And Poon’s D&B Films (cofounded by another HK film legend, Sammo Hung) eventually decided they wanted in on the action.

First, D&B gave Michelle Yeoh the stage name “Michelle Khan” (which they thought would appeal more to Western audiences), taught her Cantonese, and tested her out as the love interest in Sammo Hung’s 1984 action comedy The Owl Vs Bombo. Watching the action come together around her, Yeoh quickly realized that stunt work wasn’t all that different from the ballet dancing she’d been trained in since age four. (She was always a natural athlete too, becoming the junior champion of Malaysia in squash.) She knew she could learn choreography quickly and wanted to take on the challenge of doing her own stunts. 

“When I started off in 1984, women were relegated to being the damsel in distress,” Yeoh told People. “We need to be protected, according to our guys. But then I would go, ‘No, guys, I think we can protect ourselves pretty well. And if push comes to shove, maybe I can protect you too.’” Thanks to some encouragement from a producer’s wife, D&B gave her that chance a year later in her first starring role: Yes, Madam, a buddy cop thriller that also doubled as the first acting vehicle for American martial arts star Cynthia Rothrock, who’d go on to have her own impressive run in Hong Kong action movies. 

Michelle Yeoh trained eight hours a day in a stunt gym to get in fighting shape and the work paid off. Yes, Madam was an immediate hit and quickly kicked off a new “girls with guns” trend in Hong Kong action cinema: movies about tough female leads (often cops) who engage in shootouts in between beating up baddies with their martial arts skills. Though the movie as a whole is pretty unbalanced, with way too much time spent on its bumbling male supporting cast, Yeoh and Rothrock are absolutely electric in their action scenes together. It’s impossible not to cheer when they cockily low-five before taking on an army of goons. And Yeoh would get an even better “girls with guns” vehicle the next year with Royal Warriors, a police revenge thriller co-starring a young Hiroyuki Sanada and featuring an all-time great airplane fight.

Both roles showcase Yeoh’s knack for combining brutal action with playful fun. She knows just when to punctuate a movement with the hint of a smile, and her dramatic acting chops are put to great use in Royal Warriors too, which takes some pretty brutal twists and turns in between its high-octane fights. It’s also really striking how much these movies allow their female leads to get the absolute shit kicked out of them by men—something Hollywood films often shy away from by giving female heroes female villains to fight. In Hong Kong, there’s a refreshing sense that female fighters really are just “one of the boys.”

While Michelle Yeoh was an instant action hit right out of the gate, her career almost took a very different path when she married Poon and officially retired from acting in 1988. She intended to play the family matriarch to his ever-growing luxury goods business. But when she found out she couldn’t have kids, she left the marriage before things got bitter. Though she was worried her fanbase had moved on, she was reassured they were still waiting for her next star vehicle. And she ended her five-year acting hiatus with a bang: co-starring opposite Jackie Chan in Police Story 3: Supercop, the crown jewel of her Hong Kong career. 

After Bruce Lee’s untimely death, Chan stepped in as the next great innovator of the kung fu genre, combining comedy, contemporary urban settings, and elaborate setpieces into a whole new action movie vocabulary we still know and love today. (Chan got his start in the acrobatics-based China Drama Academy, which is not totally dissimilar to Yeoh’s dance background.) Police Story became his signature franchise and with the third entry, director Stanley Tong wanted to give Chan a true female co-lead rather than just a girl or two to rescue. Tong thought his old friend Yeoh was a natural pick, and there’s a strong argument to be made that she’s actually so good she steals the movie away from Chan.

Yeoh’s signature moment comes when she jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train—a standout stunt that’s even more impressive once you know that she (barely) learned to ride a motorcycle just for the movie. But Supercop is also a great early showcase for her comedy chops too. There’s a scene where she tries to jump through a just-shut window shutter that’s as funny as anything I’ve ever seen in an action comedy. One of Chan’s greatest impulses as a fight choreographer is emphasizing how exhausting everything is, rather than making it look effortless. (It’s the same quality that makes Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies so special.) And it’s fun to watch Yeoh not just be a badass, but a fallible badass—especially when the movie’s goofy cops-undercover premise lets her dance along the spectrum from officious to girlish. It’s no wonder she got her own spin-off film, Supercop 2 (a disappointingly dull follow-up that still offers some fun stunts). 

While Supercop may be Yeoh’s best-known Hong Kong work—and, building off Chan’s American crossover success, the movie that eventually got her to Hollywood—she’d try her hand at several more action subgenres over the next few years before finally expanding her career into the West. Directed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping, Wing Chun is basically a retro throwback to old-fashioned period-piece kung fu movies of the 1970s (albeit with a rather odd sex comedy through line tossed in as well). Yeoh plays Chinese folk hero Yim Wing-chun, who decides to become a martial artist rather than accept an arranged marriage—only to find herself lonelier than she expected. Highlights include Donnie Yen as her himbo love interest, a scene where she makes the bad guy call her “mother,” a brief cameo from Cheng Pei-pei, and a fight over a slab of tofu that easily ranks as one of Yeoh’s finest action setpieces. 

Wing Chun paints a fascinating, if uneven, portrait of how three different women choose to live their lives within Chinese society, something that’s also true of 1993’s The Heroic Trio, an absolutely bananas superhero movie from Johnnie To. Michelle Yeoh plays the conflicted villain: a woman who’s been raised as the pawn of an evil methane-breathing underground cult and uses an invisibility cloak to kidnap newborn babies from the hospital. Naturally, that brings her into conflict with a noble superhero known as Wonder Woman (a graceful Anita Mui) and a loud-mouthed bounty hunter called Chat (an absolutely hilarious Maggie Cheung). Even by the non-realist standards of Hong Kong action cinema, the whole movie is pretty insane. Nearly every scene is accompanied by a fog and/or wind machine, even when the characters are indoors. But it’s exhilarating to watch a trio of female superheroes team up decades before Hollywood would offer anything close to the same. (The trio would reunite again in the less well-received sequel Executioners.)

During its heyday, Hong Kong set action trends that eventually made their way to American movies about a decade later. Before Yeoh helped make the wuxia “wife fu” genre a global phenomenon with the international co-production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000, she had plenty of experience with the homegrown version as well. 1993’s Butterfly And Sword represents the ’90s wave of lavish wuxia period pieces with more elaborate wire-work and bigger special effects. Yeoh plays an assassin in the mystical “martial arts world” who’s caught up in a love triangle with two of her childhood friends (Donnie Yen and Tony Leung). And while it’s a pretty messy movie plot-wise, Yeoh’s performance hints at the kind of graceful repression she would bring to Crouching Tiger, as well as the icy passive aggression that makes her so captivating in Crazy Rich Asians. Plus, there’s a scene where she turns her sleeves into a bow string and launches Leung as a human arrow through a guy’s chest. What more do you need? 

Another memorably bonkers moment in Yeoh’s filmography is the scene where she and five princesses unite into a human Voltron in Wong Jing’s slapstick, gender-bending wuxia sex comedy Holy Weapon. Indeed, there’s almost no Hong Kong action subgenre Yeoh didn’t contribute to during the first decade of her career—and no major male star she didn’t work with, including Jet Li in 1993’s historical epic Tai Chi Master. She even briefly got in on the “gun fu” aesthetic that John Woo pioneered in his seminal 1989 film A Better Tomorrow (and that American audiences might know from The Matrix and John Wick). Her version came as one of seven gun-wielding secret agents in 1994’s Wonder Seven—a movie I was desperate to watch for this column but that doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere. Still, just the trailer shot of her in sunglasses, twirling onto a motorcycle mid-shootout feels worthy of applause. 

Michelle Yeoh would go on to work with Woo himself in the 2010 wuxia epic Reign Of Assassins, as she balanced her ongoing Hollywood career with continued roles in Asian action films. But since I’m just looking at her earliest Hong Kong work here, I’m leaving all of those films up for consideration for future columns. (And, yes, that includes her turn as a panda-saving, motorcycle-riding superhero in 2004’s Silver Hawk.) Instead, I want to round things out by recommending two of my favorite hidden gems that bookend Yeoh’s early Hong Kong run.

Easily my favorite discovery of this Michelle Yeoh deep dive is 1987’s Magnificent Warriors, in which she plays a whip-carrying, plane-flying, Indiana Jones-inspired spy fighting against Imperial Japan in the 1930s. It was Yeoh’s second collaboration with director David Chung, who also helmed Royal Warriors, and he really seems to bring out something special in her as a performer. While a lot of directors emphasize Yeoh’s stoic strength, Chung encourages a playful, lighthearted girlishness that feels way more reflective of her real-life personality. As I mentioned in my piece on Mulan, female action heroes are often allowed to be scrappy, defiant, traumatized, or godlike, but they’re rarely allowed to be fun and lighthearted while still kicking ass. Magnificent Warriors made me realize how rarely I see that kind of casual, upbeat confidence in female action heroines and how genuinely inspiring I find it. (“I can’t believe boys get to feel this way all the time,” is how I put it on Letterboxd.) 

It’s also hard to think of a better way to end a marathon of Yeoh’s early work than with The Stunt Woman, Ann Hui’s deeply meta 1996 drama in which Yeoh plays a stunt performer who gets taken under the wing of an action choreographer played by Sammo Hung—the filmmaker who actually gave Yeoh her big break a decade prior. The film explores both the dangerous, underpaid struggles of being a stunt performer, as well as the unbreakable camaraderie that comes from being part of a stunt team. That Yeoh seriously injured herself while filming one of the movie’s stunts only adds to the captivatingly uncanny feeling of the entire movie. (She credits Quentin Tarantino with stopping her from walking away from action filmmaking altogether after that.)

The Stunt Woman is a fitting capper for the first stage of Yeoh’s career, which would change forever with her Bond debut the next year. Yet so much of what makes Yeoh such a compelling performer was honed in her Hong Kong days—from her skills as a martial artist to her dexterity as an actor. (She even brought her own Hong Kong stunt team to Tomorrow Never Dies.) While Everything Everywhere All At Once is a fantastic tribute to her multifaceted talents, there’s something special about going right back to the source. As both a cinematic badass and a compelling dramatic actress, Michelle Yeoh has been ahead of the curve across five decades.  

Next time: How Pam Grier defined an era