The harrowing injury that folded Michelle Yeoh in half: “I know I’m in serious trouble”
There’s no such thing as a film or television production that’s guaranteed to be immune from accident or injury, but the chances of a mishap are inevitably raised when it’s an action movie. Michelle Yeoh made her name in the genre and continues to kick ass onscreen to this day, even though it nearly killed her.
It’s been a fascinating rise to the top of the industry for an actor who dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer before injury curtailed that particular dream, only for the Manchester-educated star to carve out a niche as a daredevil leading lady in a golden period for Hong Kong action cinema in the 1980s and 1990s.
After making the jump to Hollywood by lending support in Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond adventure Tomorrow Never Dies, Yeoh made a semi-permanent shift to America in the aftermath of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, culminating in her historic Academy Award win for ‘Best Actress’ in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The first co-star Yeoh ever worked with was Jackie Chan when they shot a commercial together, and he knows better than most that an actor performing their own stunts can often lead to serious injury. What makes the former’s near-death experience cruelly ironic is that the movie it happened was called The Stunt Woman, and it existed to pay tribute to the genre’s unsung heroes.
Yeoh and her mentor Sammo Hung played the two lead roles as a pair of overlooked stunt workers who fail to get the credit and recognition they deserve for their death-defying efforts. In a harrowing case of life imitating art, one scene involved Yeoh leaping from an overpass onto a moving truck and almost ended her career, if not her life.
The first attempt went off without a hitch, but tragedy nearly struck on the second. There was padding – minimal as it was – to help break the fall, but when she landed and became stuck between two mattresses, Yeoh’s spine bent to such an unnatural extent that she felt her own legs kick her in the back of the head.
“I know I’m in serious trouble when Sammo calls me by my real name,” she told The New York Times of her cinematic father figure sprinting onto the scene shouting ‘Choo Ken’. Yeoh recalled director Ann Hui with “tears just rolling down her face” as she surveyed the carnage, with the star remarkably finding the positives in the fact she could still feel her hands if not her whole body.
After being rushed to the hospital, Yeoh was placed in a full-body cast, but somehow, she only suffered a few cracked ribs to go along with the fractured vertebrae that left her in traction for a month. There’s going method, and then there’s almost killing herself filming a stunt for a movie called The Stunt Woman.
