There are two sides to Michelle Yeoh. On the one hand, you have a woman whose report card from her peers and friends reads like a message board at a wedding; on the other, you have a woman who has asserted herself as the greatest female action hero of all time. Think about it for a second, and it seems obvious. In her Golden Globes acceptance speech in January, she mentioned that she turned 60 last year, yet as she summoned her kung-fu alter ego for Everything Everywhere All at Once, she performed each pirouette, high kick and jump herself. So while we marvel at Tom Cruise’s skydiving and taking some G-force for the sake of cinema, bear in mind that Yeoh is only a month younger than him. Interestingly, Michelle’s first cinematic role came only three years after Cruise’s debut, and Yeoh was performing high-octane martial-arts stunts in at least three films — Yes, Madam (1985) being a notable example, and a favourite of Quentin Tarantino’s — before Top Gun was released. Her Golden Globes award has therefore raised the question as to why she is not customarily spoken of in the same breath as Cruise et al in the action-hero genre. Perhaps the reason pertains to the most obvious difference between them — and I think that by the end of this story, the injustice of it will be clear to you, dear reader.
Before the silver screen came a-calling, Yeoh grew up in pursuit of her first love, dance. She was born as a child of empire, in Malaysia in 1962. While British rule had ended during the war, the ghosts of colonisation remained: for example, she was educated in a convent school, and her first language was English. “My Principal Sister Maureen insisted on us using the Queen’s English,” she says. “There was no such word as ‘okay’ — it was ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’.”
Her love of ballet would prompt her to fly halfway round the world to try to become a dancer. Initially, she enrolled at the performing-arts-focused Hammond school in Chester, before heading to the Royal Academy of Dance
