Ladies & Legends: Michelle Yeoh's Hong Kong-to-Hollywood Reinvention
By Juyun Kim | 21 Dec, 2025

Michelle Yeoh became red carpet royalty by moving forward with grit and confidence and never under-estimating her worth.

Join us as we explore the lives and times of some of history’s most prominent women of Asian and Asian American descent.

INTRO:

“Body language to me, is more fascinating than actual language.”

This is a quote from Academy Award-winner Michelle Yeoh, who has built her prolific career from the ground up, starting as a Malaysian beauty queen, and quickly becoming a martial artist and actress who did all her own stunts, to ultimately becoming a world-class movie star boasting the elegant glamour of old Hollywood in roles like Eleanor Young in Crazy Rich Asians and Madame Morrible in Wicked.

She’s known for her grace, her elegance, and her unforgettable presence but she’s also known for her resilience having transitioned from household name in Hong Kong, to icon-status here Stateside. And through it all, she’s remained true to herself, navigating disappointments in her personal life and career challenges with discipline, resilience, and above all, self knowledge.

Her fearlessness truly embodies the quote from T.S. Eliot, “only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

HOST:

"Hello welcome to Ladies and Legends, the podcast where we explore the personal journeys of legendary women and business leaders of Asian and Asian American descent. I’m your host Juyun, and today’s story is about a name respected by cinephiles on both sides of the Pacific, Michelle Yeoh.

Whether you’re a fan of Jackie Chan-era action films, stories of other dimensional realities, conventional romcoms, or musicals, you’ve heard of Michelle Yeoh. You’ve fallen in love with her effortless elegance, and lithe movements across the screen and the telltale sign of years of backbreaking training as a martial artist.

At 60, she won her first Academy Award, beating out iconic actresses like Cate Blanchett and Michelle Williams. And with the rising Hollywood momentum towards representation and a greater openness towards cross-cultural stars, she’s just getting started.

Fun fact, the emerald engagement ring she wore in Crazy Rich Asians, is actually a ring from her personal collection showing that with her great beauty, also comes great taste.

Acclaimed actress, badass martial artist, red carpet regular, and sometimes defiant and proud outsider, standing up for her values and against prejudice in Hollywood, Michelle Yeoh is a beacon of inspiration to Asian American women who have longed for representation and a positive role-model to look up to, whose attributes surpass the superficial alone.

Let’s get into it.

PART 1: Early Life & Identity

Michelle Yeoh was born on August 6, 1962, in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, into a well-established Malaysian Chinese family. Her father was a lawyer and politician, and her mother was deeply involved in community and cultural organizations. She has a brother, two half brothers, and a paternal half-sister. Two of her brothers are eye surgeons, another is a medical professional of undisclosed specialty.

Her father, Yeoh Kian-teik was elected as a Senator of Malaysia from 1959 to 1969 as a member of Perak's (a Malaysian state) Malaysian Chinese Association, the Chairman of the Perak Bar Association, and the founder of "Sri Maju" in 1975, a major intercity coach service in Malaysia and Singapore.

So you could say that from the very beginning, Michelle’s world was structured, values-driven, and achievement-oriented. And while she grew up speaking English to her father, she was also fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin by the time she started her acting career in Hong Kong. Despite this phenomenal multilingual talent (she also speaks Malay), she has said that one of her biggest regrets is never learning how to read or write Chinese characters.

Still, she grew up incredibly disciplined and at the age of four, Michelle began studying ballet. Dance wasn’t just an extracurricular—it was her identity. By her teenage years, it was clear that ballet was a true calling and her parents supported this passion wholeheartedly, sending her to England at just 15 years old to attend the Royal Academy of Dance in London. But at the age of 16, she suffered a serious spinal injury, a rotated disk, that abruptly ended her dream of becoming a professional ballerina.

Now, imagine that moment: a teenage girl in 1970s Britain, thousands of miles from home, at an elite institution, and add to that the devastating injury that would reshape her entire future.

These teen experiences began shaping her leadership foundation—adaptability, resilience, and self-reliance, early on.

Michelle later described this moment as one of profound grief.

She told The Guardian about that time, "people talk about seeing their dreams shattered, but that really happened to me.”

But instead of collapsing inward, she stayed in the room and adapted. She shifted her studies to choreography and drama. Surprisingly knowing how it all turned out, at the time she wasn’t a big fan of her drama classes. She had stage fright and would frequently skip class but nonetheless she went on to get her bachelor’s degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1983.

Leadership lesson number one: The ability to reimagine yourself after loss is a form of power.

PART 2: Beauty Pageants and Pivot

Michelle’s catapult to international stardom started out as something of a happy accident. While her dad was a high achiever on the professional and political stages, her mom, considered something of a beauty in her youth, had gotten Michelle into modeling herself, albeit unknown to her own daughter.

When Michelle was a young girl, her mom would mail in photos of her to local magazines which would publish them, with Michelle unaware until she opened the pages.

And while Michelle has said that “beauty shouldn’t be superficial and should come from within,” she herself was the surface level beauty, thick hair, even features and natural grace, that allowed her mom to enter her in the Miss Malaysia World competition right off the heels of her graduation in 1983. And she won.

“It’s me, I created her, I gave her this,” Michelle has said to Town & Country about her mom’s frequent refrain on her career.

And that same year, she represented Malaysia at the Miss World pageant in London.

For Michelle, pageantry wasn’t just about the ballgowns and glam, it was a strategic gateway. It offered visibility, confidence in public presentation, a way to master the stage fright that plagued her university years, and access to global networks that would allow her to connect with opportunities to propel her career post-pageant, forward.

She has said that her parents were always supportive of her, which allowed her to dare greatly.

“I have very supportive parents who said ‘go and do what you want to do. Home is always here for you, and if you don’t like it out there, come back. You can always do something different,’ so when you have an option like that you are able to choose roles or choose the things you want to be in.”

But unlike many aspiring starlets who have to wait years, or decades before their lucky break, Michelle’s big break happened in 1984 just a year after her competition win. A family friend suggested the recently minted Miss Malaysia World appear in a television commercial for Guy Laroche watches, alongside Jackie Chan and that brief moment changed everything.

She caught the attention of Dickson Poon, head of D&B Films, one of Hong Kong’s major production companies who signed her to his company and put up for her first starring role which was in her third film, Yes, Madam (1985). As a note Dickson Poon is also the founder of Dickson Concepts, which owns popular department store Harvey Nichols and used to hold the rights to operate Brooks Brothers in Asia for decades starting in the late 1990’s, and ending in 2015.

Unlike many actresses of the era, Michelle was not cast merely for beauty. She was athletic, disciplined, and willing to train relentlessly, and she did her own stunts which was revolutionary and practically unheard of at the time. This decision was not just physical—it was philosophical. Michelle insisted on mastery.

Michelle performed high-risk stunts—jumping from bridges onto moving trains, riding motorcycles onto trains, engaging in complex fight choreography that demanded absolute precision. She suffered injuries, including broken bones and concussions.

And then, at the height of her early fame and movies like Yes, Madam!, Royal Warriors, Magnificent Warriors and Easy Money, she stepped away from the spotlight to marry Dickson Poon.

She has said of this decision, that a large part of their marriage was predicated on the assumption they would have a large family, and despite multiple IVF attempts, they were unsuccessful and ultimately this led to their separation and then divorce in 1992. She remains close to the Poon family to this day.

She told BBC, “And I think the worst moment to go through is every month you feel like such a failure. And then you go, why? And I think at some point you stop blaming yourself. I go, there are certain things in your body that doesn't function in a certain way. That's how it is. You just have to let go and move on. And I think you come to a point where you have to stop blaming you."

She goes on in that interview to talk about open discourse between couples, and the importance of being fair, in navigating a partnership where both individuals should be able to get what they want out of it, showing her strategic and empathetic approach to relationships.

Leadership lesson number two: Resilience is of utmost importance in all aspects of life, and while one area can be going well, another may fall spectacularly apart. And the beauty and nuance is in how one navigates those challenges.

PART 3: New Horizons and Challenges

On the heels of her separation, she jumped headfirst back into acting alongside Jackie Chan in the action classic, Supercop in 1992.

This film required her to execute a couple of the most dangerous stunts of her career including rolling off a van onto a moving convertible and riding a motorcycle onto a moving train, and whether by luck or skill she completed filming relatively unscathed.

But a few years and 8 movies later, she was not as lucky.

And while filming The Stunt Woman (1996) she cracked ribs and a fractured vertebrae after misjudging an 18-foot jump from a bridge onto a moving truck. This monumental moment forced her to reconsider her commitment to acting once more. And the rumor is that Quentin Tarantino was the one who talked her out of it. Which was a good thing, because she was on the brink of a completely new era of her career.

Michelle was about to go global, by making a name for herself outside of Hong Kong.

In 1997 she would star opposite Pierce Brosnan in James Bond franchise film, Tomorrow Never Dies, which turned a profit to middling reviews when it was released but has since experienced new life and appreciation for it’s prescience around media manipulation and other topics that have come under scrutiny since then.

She enjoyed her time on the set with Brosnan commenting on his openness, warmth and on him being very much a gentleman.

By contrast, while she maintains a friendship with Jackie Chan, she has publicly called him some not so flattering things, saying on a 1997 episode with David Letterman, “he’s a male chauvinistic pig […] [who] always believes that women should stay at home and cook and don’t do anything and be the victim … ‘Except for Michelle now,’ he said, because I would kick his butt.”

She followed up this trans-Pacific success with her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, while taking a break from movies stateside due to the pigeonholing and prejudice she still perceived out of Hollywood, despite the Bond franchise’s latest success showing an Asian American leading lady was indeed sellable.

She told People Magazine, “At that point, people in the industry couldn’t really tell the difference between whether I was Chinese or Japanese or Korean or if I even spoke English,” Yeoh said. “They would talk very loudly and very slow [at me]. I didn’t work for almost two years, until ‘Crouching Tiger,’ simply because I could not agree with the stereotypical roles that were put forward to me.”

Leadership lesson number three: Representation is not about visibility alone—it’s about integrity and the refusal to debase yourself to others’ inferior expectations.

PART 4: Personal Life

Obviously, since then something had to, and did change.

The success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon placed Michelle on a global pedestal—but it also burdened her with representation. She was no longer just Michelle Yeoh. She was, unfairly, the face of Asian womanhood for Western audiences.

Instead of shrinking under that pressure, she expanded and chose roles carefully.

A few highlights, in 2005 she co-starred as Mameha, a seasoned Geisha in Memoirs of a Geisha, which itself was not without controversy given that she wasn’t ethnically Japanese, in 2008 she co-starred in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and in 2018 was given the role of the imperious Singaporean would-be mother-in-law, Eleanor Young in Crazy Rich Asians, all the while traversing between roles stateside when they pleased her, and in Hong Kong.

Then the role of a lifetime happened.

But before we get into that, let’s take a beat to explore Michelle Yeoh’s personal life.

What became of this badass beauty after her 1992 divorce? New love of course, and in an unexpected way, as is often the case.

Michelle met Jean Todt, a French motor racing executive, at a publicity event for Ferrari in Shanghai in 2004. At the time, he was the newly appointed CEO of Ferrari, a role he held for 5 years until 2008.

They would get engaged a year later, which seems quick. But they were engaged for 18 years before tying the knot in 2023. It’s worth mentioning between Dickson and Jean, Michelle had weathered another engagement to cardiologist Alan Heldman in 1998 before breaking up in 2000.

A little about Mr. Michelle Yeoh.

Jean Todt started his racing career as a world championship rally co-driver winning events like the 1973 Rally of Poland. And in the aftermath, as Peugeot Talbot Sport Director, he won WRC titles in 1985 and 1986, the Paris-Dakar multiple times (1997-1990) and Le Mans in 1992 and 1993.

Ultimately, what he may be best known for, especially among racing enthusiasts, is his tenure as Scuderia Ferrari Team Principal, transforming a struggling Ferrari into an F1 giant, leading to 14 World titles and 106 Grand Prix wins. And then serving as Ferrari’s CEO from 2004-2008.

She told People about their marriage, “I am so blessed because he’s so supportive of what I do. I love my work. This is my passion. He never turns around and says you spend a lot of time away from me, which I have sometimes, but he’s very understanding,” she says, before commenting on her travel plans on their anniversary. “On the day of our anniversary, I actually was flying.”

And apparently the man known for speed and mastery on the racecourse, is also a romantic who remembers how long they have been together, by day, by hour and even by minute.

Part 5: The Golden Age of Michelle Yeoh

Getting back into Michelle Yeoh’s epic career, in October 2018, Crazy Rich Asians became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the last 10 years, and the 6th-highest-grossing ever. And it was done on a relatively modest budget showing that box office revenue doesn’t only come from pricey visual effects, but also from representation paired with compelling new stories which to mainstream audiences often have a cultural bent.

In fact, Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $120.8 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues.

And while all the actors were a pleasure to watch, it was Michelle Yeoh’s withering look and cutting comments to her son’s girlfriend in the film, that stands out as some of the most memorable, skin-writhing moments. Even though she never became a mom herself, she demonstrated the kind of over-bearing protectiveness that would frighten even the most hardened and independent career women.

She then went on to star in Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s a film about a harried, over-worked and over-stressed Chinese American immigrant who runs a laundromat that is being audited by the IRS. Meanwhile her husband of two decades plans to serve her with divorce papers, and her daughter barely speaks to her. She’s confronted with other dimensional possibilities, more exciting routes her life could have taken, in her attempt to defeat the monsters that are converging on the space she’s in, getting powers from the other versions of herself.

It's a quirky, if brilliant film, and in 2023, Michelle Yeoh made history by becoming the first Asian woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Her acceptance speech was not just celebratory—it was declarative.

“This is a beacon of hope and possibility,” she said.

The success is fast-coming now, in 2024 she starred as Madame Morrible, a calculating and prejudiced headmistress in the film adaptation of the Broadway hit, Wicked. And she follows that up with her appearance in Volume 2, Wicked: For Good this holiday season. Both performed exceptionally well at the box office.

OUTRO:

For decades, Michelle Yeoh has been a force—first in Hong Kong cinema, then on the global stage, and ultimately in Hollywood history. She is a classically trained ballerina turned action star, a woman who broke bones and barriers, a performer who carried entire industries on her shoulders while rarely being allowed to carry a narrative centered fully on her humanity—until she finally did.

Today, in 2025 it’s hard to remember a time when Michelle Yeoh wasn’t a household name. Growing up in an Asian American family, I was aware of her talent by way of her Hong Kong action films before my Caucasian classmates, but it’s inspiring to see how she’s transcended the martial arts pigeonholes into recognition as a world class actress.

And while her early success seemed incredibly lucky, it’s through her integrity, grit, and refusal to accept roles that showcased her as less than the brilliance she is, that she was able to attain icon status and industry respect.

You could say she has it all, even without kids she has a loving partner, a supportive family, and professional success most can only dream of. So what do we take away from Michelle Yeoh’s journey? Maybe this: early success can be easy, but lasting legacy requires patience, hard work and unwavering faith in what you have to offer the world.

That wraps up today’s episode of Ladies and Legends. Whether you admire her intensity, self-belief, or resilience in life and business, Michelle Yeoh is a study in forward-looking momentum.

Thanks for listening. Be sure to follow the show, leave a review, and share this episode if you enjoyed it. I’m Juyun, and I’ll catch you next time on “Ladies and Legends."

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