‘‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’’ (2000).With Pierce Brosnan in ‘‘Tomorrow
Never Dies’’ (1997).Michelle Yeoh in ‘‘The Stunt Woman’’ (1996).From top: Alamy; Photofest; Alamy.
The New York Times Magazine 25time among France, Switzerland and Malaysia.
Yeoh wore a cream turtleneck sweater, and there
was a refi ned quality to her high cheekbones and
smooth brow that reminded me equally of the
ancient Chinese lady warriors and ultrawealthy
socialites she has played, though with her sub-
tly cat-eyed glasses and the way she kept urging
me to eat — the table was blanketed in breakfast
pastries — she also reminded me of my most
elegant auntie.
Yeoh promised to take me through a bit of her
daily fi tness routine, so I had come to the hotel
expecting to watch her do the elliptical, her favor-
ite mode of exercise, in the guest gymnasium.
Instead, she asked me to follow her to the hotel
suite’s bedroom, where she took off her shoes
and lay down on the pillowy bedding — then
mimed waking up. (She had decided that a basic
workout would be ‘‘too boring.’’) She stretched
her body as far out as it could go on the verti-
cal axis, pointed her toes downward and let her
fi ngertips brush the headboard of the oversize
bed. Next, she shifted into a series of reaching,
grasping movements, which she described as
‘‘climbing an invisible wall.’’ Her light, wiry body
lengthened as she pulled against an imagined
resistance. She softly chanted, Om mani padme
hum, a Buddhist mantra that she invokes to keep
herself safe and blessed. ‘‘And the other one I say
to myself is: ‘Please forgive me. I’m sorry. Thank
you, I love you,’ ’’ she said, closing her eyes for a
long moment. ‘‘Because, you know, I hurt myself
doing some things. So I say it to my own body
before I do anything.’’
Yeoh struggles with jet lag, often fi nding
herself alert at 3 a.m. Her waking routine is
designed to create a bubble of mindfulness that
she can transport wherever she goes. Still lying
on her back, she showed me how she begins
loosening her hips, swinging a leg in the air
in large, graceful circles, fi rst turning the hip
inward and then shifting it out into a position
used for ballet. She extended the leg in a lift,
then ended with three small, controlled kicks.
Common wisdom holds that the body can’t eas-
ily be conditioned for both ballet and martial
arts at once: The physical orientation required
of one would seem to be in direct opposition
to the needs of the other. But Yeoh has defi edand college. But a back injury derailed her train-
ing. When she returned home after graduating,
her mother entered her in the Miss Malaysia
competition, which she won. It was a victory, but
also a detour from a path that until that point
pointed decisively toward dance. ‘‘My dream
really, at that time, was to teach ballet,’’ she said.
One day in Hong Kong, a friend was having
dinner with the entrepreneur and fi lm producer
Dickson Poon, who told her that he was short on
actresses. Her friend took a photo of Yeoh from
her wallet and started singing her praises. Yeoh
got on a plane to meet with Poon, and the next
day she was shooting a wristwatch commercial
with Jackie Chan, outbiking and outriding him
through a lakeside landscape. In 1984, she was
cast in an action fi lm, ‘‘The Owl vs. Bumbo,’’ as
a damsel in distress. As Yeoh watched the fi ght
sequences, she recognized the underlying move-
ments. ‘‘It’s rhythm,’’ she recalled thinking. ‘‘It’s
choreography. It’s timing. But at the end of the
day, it’s like a tango on steroids. You know, boom,
boom, boom!’’ She was demure, longhaired, a more
obvious candidate for a love interest, but the
action attracted her. ‘‘So, I said, ‘I would love to
try.’ ’’ The studio set her up in a gym frequented
by stuntmen and action stars, where she trained
with actors she would later go on to battle
in-scene. Within a year, she was the lead in her
own kung fu movie, ‘‘Yes, Madam!’’
Andre Morgan, an American fi lm producer,
recalls attending a dinner organized by Poon
around that time and meeting Yeoh — a sweet,
charming young actress who focused on strength-
ening both her acting and her martial arts. She
was frequently covered in bruises but remained
undaunted. Doing martial arts is one thing, he
explains, but on camera you’re expected to pull
your punches and subtly avoid other actors’
strikes, while making it all look real. ‘‘When
you’re learning as a young trainee, as hard as you
try, your timing isn’t perfect, so you get kicked,
and you get punched, and you get hit,’’ Morgan
says. ‘‘She was brave enough that she was willing
to take the punches and the kicks while she was
perfecting it. That was the defi nition of somebody
that was really seriously devoted to mastering the
skills of being an on-camera martial artist.’’
In 1988, after Yeoh starred in a half-dozen
action fi lms made with Poon’s studio, D&B Films,
she married Poon and retired from acting to start
a family; she didn’t think she could juggle being
an actor, wife and mother. She wanted children
badly but was unsuccessful. It was a heartbreak,
for which she partly blames the shame and opac-
ity that surrounded reproductive health at thethis, cultivating a sort of full-body ambidexteri-
ty, shifting at will between modes of movement
that have lived in her for years.
Born into an upper-class family in Ipoh, a
tin-mining city in Malaysia surrounded by lime-
stone caves and steep mountains, Yeoh spent
much of her childhood in motion. She took bal-
let; played basketball with her mother, brother
and cousins; and boated and swam in the sea on
weekends. Her father, a lawyer, spent his free
time tending to his kelongs — traditional wood-
en structures used for fi shing. When she was a
teenager, her parents sent her to Britain, where
she continued to pursue ballet in boarding school