With Zhang Ziyi in ‘‘Memoirs of
a Geisha’’ (2005).‘‘Crazy Rich Asians’’ (2018).‘‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the
Ten Rings’’ (2021).time. Within four years, she and Poon divorced,
though they remain friends, and Yeoh is god-
mother to Poon’s daughter.
After the divorce, Yeoh was surprised to fi nd
that she was still in demand after several years
away from the industry, and she leapt back into
acting with renewed purpose. In 1992, she starred
alongside Jackie Chan in the internationally dis-
tributed ‘‘Supercop’’ — a milestone in the main-
streaming of the martial-arts fi lm in the West
— followed by major roles in nearly a dozen other
action-heavy titles. By the end of the decade,
Yeoh had mastered Hong Kong cinema, in which
quickness and precision blend with fl ashy, play-
ful daring. But it was ‘‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon’’ that made her a superstar. In it, she had
to achieve an ethereal, almost immaterial quality
very diff erent from the rough-and-tumble chor-
eography of street fi ghting. Yeoh trades intricate
volleys of strikes and blocks, at one point even
running down and across a vertical courtyard
wall in pursuit of her masked opponent. She
does all this with an unfurrowed brow, giving
the impression of a fi ghter immersed in a battle
so demanding that it consumes her every move-
ment, with nothing left over for theatrics — of a
person who has sublimated her body into pure,
almost transcendent gesture.
Yeoh helped to animate Lee’s vision of a
graceful, aestheticized, classical kung fu, but
the production was a much greater challenge
for her than it may appear onscreen. Neither
Yeoh nor her co-star Chow Yun-Fat spoke Man-
darin fl uently, and both, she recalls, had to learn
the complex lines, written in a historical style,
phonetically. Nor was Yeoh practiced in the
traditional martial-arts style used in the fi lm,
combining infl uences from Peking Opera and
acrobatics. Early into shooting, she tore a knee
ligament while fi lming the pivotal courtyard
scene. She had one shot remaining in the scene,
in which she was supposed to be running toward
the camera at high speed — so they placed her in
a wheelbarrow and pushed her toward the cam-
era, fi lming her from the waist up as she churned
her arms furiously. Then she left for surgery and
was off set for weeks as she recovered. ‘‘It was
really tough,’’ Lee told me over the phone. ‘‘That
was supposed to be her strength.’’
When Yeoh was able to walk, she returned and
shot her remaining scenes while wearing a brace.
But when it came time for the fi lm’s emotional
climax, with her character saying goodbye to
her poisoned beloved, cradling him in her arms,
she nailed it. ‘‘I knew those were real tears,’’ Lee
remembered. ‘‘A lot of pressures gushing out,
months of repression, and perhaps a lifetime of
hopeful thinking. All that eff ort comes up.’’ After
watching, he had to go off and cry for about 15
minutes. ‘‘In Chinese we call it xiang you xin
sheng — your countenance, when the way you
look comes from the heart.’’
‘‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’’ led to
a new set of internationally minded dramatic
roles, in which Yeoh tended to embody beau-
tiful, polished women. She played the large-
hearted elite geisha Mameha in ‘‘Memoirs of
a Geisha’’; the now-fallen Burmese leader Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s biopic ‘‘The
Lady’’; a mystical warrior master in Marvel’s
‘‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’’;and the chilly Eleanor Young in ‘‘Crazy Rich
Asians,’’ a future mother-in-law bound by cus-
tom and propriety, whose rigidity masks her
own struggle with what’s expected of her.
Yeoh continued to tell her characters’ stories
through their physicality: There’s a hint of the
grandmaster in the grace with which Mameha,
the geisha, closes her umbrella, and in the matri-
arch Eleanor Young’s perfect posture. But in the
more psychologically focused world of West-
ern drama, she could delve into her characters’
psyches at an even deeper level, exploring the
complex ramifi cations of their self-restraint.
Yeoh won high acclaim for these performances,
with the critic A. O. Scott calling her ‘‘one of the
great international movie stars of the past quar-
ter-century.’’ But bending her deeply ingrained
poise into a more ungainly, everyday shape —
while continuing to kick ass — may be Yeoh’s
most complicated assignment yet.THE FLUSTERED, DISHEVELED, curmudgeonly
heroine of ‘‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’’
would seem to bear little resemblance to the
practiced martial artist from ‘‘Supercop’’ who
can knock out two bad guys at once with a sin-
gle airborne split-kick. But Daniel Scheinert and
Daniel Kwan (the directing duo best known for
their feature from 2016, ‘‘Swiss Army Man’’) wrote
the part of Evelyn exclusively for her — in the
earliest version of the script, the lead character
was even named Michelle. ‘‘Our producers were
like, What do we do with it if Michelle can’t do it?’’
Kwan told me over the phone. ‘‘And we were like,
I don’t know — maybe make a diff erent movie?’’
Scheinert, also on the call, jumped in: ‘‘Yeah, who
else can do the action? Who can nail the drama?
There’s no one else who does what she has done
and has that history and that experience. And
that being said, even still, she surprised us.’’ Yeoh
was open to the wide-ranging role and enthusi-
astically supported the movie after signing on;
later, the Daniels learned that she had been very
unsure, early on, about some of the crazier parts
(the hot dog hands, for example), but that their
confi dence had persuaded her.
‘‘She’s the queen of martial-arts movies,’’ says Ke
Huy Quan, Yeoh’s co-star in the fi lm. A former child
star who appeared in ‘‘The Goonies’’ and ‘‘Indi-
ana Jones and the Temple of Doom,’’ Quan retired
from acting for more than 20 years, working as an
action choreographer behind the scenes, before26 3.20.22
This page, from top: Columbia, via Everett Collection; Warner Bros. Pictures, via Everett Collection; Alamy. Opposite: A24.