Background and career
Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng (YOH; ; Chinese: 楊紫瓊; 6 August 1962) is a Malaysian actress. In a career spanning over four decades, she has acted in film and television productions covering a wide range of genres and received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, along with nominations for two British Academy Film Awards. Credited as Michelle Khan in her early films, she rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s after starring in Hong Kong action and martial arts films where she performed her own stunts. These roles included Yes, Madam (1985), Magnificent Warriors (1987), Police Story 3: Supercop (1992), The Heroic Trio and Tai Chi Master (both 1993), and Wing Chun (1994). After moving to the United States, Yeoh gained international recognition for her starring roles in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and in Ang Lee's wuxia martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); the latter earned her a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her Hollywood career progressed with roles in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sunshine (2007), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). She continued to appear in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, starring in True Legend and Reign of Assassins (both 2010); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016); and Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (2018). In 2011, she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi in the British biographical film The Lady (2011). Yeoh played supporting roles in the romantic comedies Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Last Christmas (2019), as well as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the television series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2020). Her voice acting work has included Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011); Minions: The Rise of Gru and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (both 2022); Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023); and The Tiger's Apprentice (2024). For her starring role as Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Asian to win the category. She has since featured in the mystery film A Haunting in Venice (2023), the musical fantasy films Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025), and the sports drama film It's My Time (2026). The film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes ranked her the greatest action heroine of all time in 2008. In 1997, she was chosen by People as one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World", and in 2009 the same magazine listed her as one of the "35 All-Time Screen Beauties." In 2022, Time named her one of the world's 100 most influential people on its annual listicle and its Icon of the Year. In 2024, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yeoh was born on 6 August 1962 in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, to Dato’ Yeoh Kian-teik (1925–2014), a politician, and Datin Janet Yeoh (born 1939). She has a brother, Robert Yeoh, an eye surgeon, two half-brothers, Lam Hoe, a medical professional, and Ronald Yeoh, an eye surgeon, and a paternal half-sister, Tan Chee Koon (born 1949). Her father was elected as a Senator of Malaysia from 1959 to 1969 as a member of Perak's 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. Of Hokkien and Cantonese ancestry, she grew up speaking English to her father, and could understand some Malaysian Cantonese from her maternal grandmother who lived with them. She learned to speak Cantonese and Mandarin fluently in the 1980s and 1990s after starting her career in Hong Kong. Despite that, she never learned to read or write Chinese characters, which she has said was her greatest regret. Yeoh was keen on dance from an early age, beginning ballet at age four. She went to the girls school Main Convent Ipoh. At age fifteen, she moved with her parents to England. There, she was enrolled in The Hammond School, Chester, where she started to train as a ballet dancer. However, a spinal injury prevented her from becoming a professional ballet dancer, and she shifted her attention to choreography and other arts. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Crewe + Alsager College of Higher Education in 1983.
In 1983, twenty-year-old Yeoh won the Miss Malaysia World beauty contest. She was Malaysia's representative at the Miss World 1983 pageant in London, where she placed eighteenth. Later that year, she traveled to Australia where she won the 1984 Miss Moomba International pageant. Her first acting work was in a television commercial for Guy Laroche watches with Jackie Chan. This caught the attention of a fledgling Hong Kong film production company, D&B Films. Although she had a passive understanding of the Ipoh Cantonese spoken in her hometown, she could not speak it. During a phone call in Cantonese, she was offered to co-star in a television commercial with a Sing Long, and only realized that was Chan's Cantonese name when she arrived in the studio. She learned to speak Cantonese as she began her career in Hong Kong. Yeoh began her acting career in action and martial arts films, in which she performed her own stunts. Yeoh's first lead role came in her third film, Yes, Madam (1985). Yeoh initially used the pseudonym Michelle Khan, a stage name selected by D&B Films for its potential appeal to international and Western audiences. In 1987, Yeoh married her first husband Dickson Poon, a co-founder of D&B Films, and decided to retire from acting.
After five years of marriage, Yeoh divorced Poon and returned to acting with Police Story 3: Supercop (1992). She appeared in The Heroic Trio (1993), and the Yuen Woo-ping films Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun in 1993 and 1994, respectively.
She changed her stage name back to Michelle Yeoh when she started her Hollywood career with Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997. In the 1997 James Bond film, she played Wai Lin opposite star Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan was impressed, describing her as a "wonderful actress" who was "serious and committed about her work." He referred to her as a "female James Bond" in reference to her combat abilities. Yeoh wanted to perform her own stunts but was prevented because director Roger Spottiswoode considered it too dangerous. Nevertheless, she performed all of her own fighting scenes.In 1997, Yeoh played Soong Ai-ling in the award-winning The Soong Sisters. Yeoh was approached by director Ang Lee to star as Yu Shu Lien in her first Mandarin-language martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). She did not speak Mandarin until the 2000s, and she had to learn the Mandarin lines for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically. The film was an international success, and earned Yeoh a BAFTA 2000 nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In 2002, Yeoh produced her first English film, The Touch, through her own production company Mythical Films. In 2004, Yeoh met Jean Todt, a French motor racing executive, in Shanghai during a publicity event for Ferrari. They became engaged later that same year. In 2005, Yeoh starred as Mameha in the film adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, and she continued her English-language work in 2007 with Sunshine. In 2008, Yeoh starred in the fantasy action film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor with Brendan Fraser and Jet Li.
In 2011, she portrayed Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson's The Lady. Yeoh was blacklisted by the Burmese government allegedly because of her participation in The Lady; she was refused entry to Myanmar on 22 June 2011 and was deported on the same day. In October 2011, Yeoh was chosen by Guerlain to be its skincare ambassador. Yeoh's role was to help strengthen the French cosmetics company's relationship with Asia. Yeoh did not branch out into television until 2015, with her first role playing Mei Foster, wife to the British Ambassador to Thailand, who is secretly a North Korean spy named Li-Na, on the fifth season of the Cinemax/Sky series Strike Back. In 2016, Yeoh was cast as Starfleet Captain Philippa Georgiou of the starship USS Shenzhou in the series Star Trek: Discovery, and recurs as Georgiou's "mirror" doppelganger later in the series. Yeoh went on to play the role for three seasons, garnering critical acclaim and becoming a fan favourite. Following the success of Star Trek: Discovery, a spin-off series with Yeoh in the leading role, was commissioned in 2019. The series, which would centre on Yeoh's character, Emperor Georgiou working as a member of Section 31, a secret galactic spy organization, was still "in development" as of January 2023, but in April, Paramount+ announced it had ordered a Star Trek: Section 31 feature film starring Yeoh, rather than a series. In 2018, Yeoh played family matriarch Eleanor Young in Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians, a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan's book of the same name, opposite Constance Wu and Henry Golding. Carlos Aguilar of TheWrap described her performance as "convincingly subdued". In 2019, she played Christmas themed-store owner "Santa" in Last Christmas, opposite Henry Golding and Emilia Clarke. The film was a box office success, grossing over $121 million worldwide. Yeoh played Ying Nan in Marvel Studios' Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. It was announced at The Game Awards 2020 that Yeoh would star in Ark: The Animated Series, a series based on the video game Ark: Survival Evolved by Studio Wildcard, in which she plays the role of Meiyin Li, a 3rd-century Chinese rebel leader, known as the Beast Queen.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
