Michelle Yeoh on why martial arts movies “deserve more respect and dignity”
For the last 40 years, Michelle Yeoh has been kicking ass and taking names on the big screen, becoming a cinematic trailblazer in more ways than one.
The first Asian to win an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ and the first Malaysian to win an Oscar in general, the star has made a career out of breaking down barriers that stretches right back to her early days in Hong Kong cinema.
Taken under the wing of legendary performer, producer, and filmmaker Sammo Hung, Yeoh was bumped up to lead status in only her second-ever feature appearance, with 1985’s Yes, Madam setting the stage for an ascension towards becoming one of her generation’s most vaunted martial arts heroes.
Magnificent Warriors, Police Story 3: Supercop, The Heroic Trio, and Tai Chi Master continued her upward trajectory, and Yeoh’s big break in Hollywood came under impressive circumstances when she was allowed to indulge her preference for doing her own stunts in Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond sequel Tomorrow Never Dies.
Not long after that, Yeoh’s international profile was raised to another level when she anchored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon alongside Chow Yun-fat, which ended up as the highest-grossing foreign-language movie ever released in the United States at the time.
Beyond that, the Ang Lee-directed wuxia epic earned Yeoh a Bafta nomination for ‘Best Actress’, won the Oscar for ‘Best International Feature’, competed in the major categories by way of its ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ nods, and was almost single-handedly responsible for the martial arts movie exploding in popularity around the world at the turn of the millennium.
For somebody who’d made their name in that arena, Yeoh was glad to see Crouching Tiger take off in the way that it did, explaining to the BBC she’d been waiting a long time for that form of filmmaking to gain recognition and appreciation outside of home shores that it was always deserving.
“The reason why I decided to wait two years after the Bond movie, and to work with Ang Lee in a martial arts movie, is because I really believe that this genre deserves more respect and dignity than it’s ever been given,” she said. “Before, people saw it as a fairy tale; they felt they could take it easy. But it shouldn’t be about that. It’s so steeped in our culture, it should have more depth to it.”
Yeoh admitted that “it’s never easy to find that balance” of making a distinctly local-feeling picture that has global appeal, but it would be safe to say Crouching Tiger managed it. “It was a risk,” she acknowledged, “But when we did this movie, it was for a Western audience.” Suffice to say, it was mission accomplished for Yeoh, who played a huge part in an influential blend of martial arts movie, prestige drama, and box office juggernaut.
