It seems only apt that after decades at the top of her game, Michelle Yeoh finally triumphed at the Oscars this year with a performance that transcends both genres and languages. At times, Everything Everywhere All At Once even feels like a greatest hits montage of Yeoh’s already multi-faceted career – blending her most physical performances with her most emotional – going all-in on everything from her monstrous matriarchs to those hard-nosed cops; the delicate wuxia and the properly gnarly face-kicking.

After all, The Yeoh’s journey from Malaysian pageant winner to world-renowned action icon has been anything but straight-forward; there’s any number of reasons she’s as celebrated as she is in genre circles. Obviously she’s very, very, very good at beating people up whilst looking cool, but it’s also impossible to ignore just how much of a pioneer she’s been, not just for women in action, but for the genre as a whole too.

Enough to make her the recipient of this year’s ‘Legend’ award at Forbidden Worlds Film Festival, that’s for sure. Something which opened the door to a trilogy of exceedingly rare screenings, covering some of her most defining work out of Hong Kong – a holy trifecta of old-school cop movie Royal Warriors, balls-to-the-wall stunt-driven spectacular Supercop, and wild-eyed all-time cult classic The Heroic Trio. The work of a true pathfinder, especially given just how things started off.

Originally a ballet dancer, turned Miss Malaysia World winner, Yeoh’s image was as feminine as they come. It was only after a random job on a commercial with none other than Jackie Chan, that she would swap worlds completely. Quickly spun into bit-parts in the Hong Kong martial arts movies of legendary director and performer Sammo Hung, it was her background in movement and choreography that would soon build her up as a star of the scene. And by the mid-1980s, she was already fronting her own work, twisting the idea of the aspirational “glamorous” female lead into something much more complicated and exciting.

Royal Warriors

Enter 1986’s girls-with-guns genre classic Royal Warriors; a film which proudly fronts Yeoh as its lone star on the poster (even if that’s not strictly speaking true), pitching her as decidedly glam and carefully made-up in gold jewellery and killer lipstick, with perfectly coiffed hair – while also carrying a giant fuck-off Desert Eagle. The grand appeal of these movies, and this world, was still very much the latter – big guns, impressively staged fighting, sensationally dangerous stunts – but producers D&B Films weren’t going to shy away from the fact that their newest star was a champion beauty queen too.

And unsurprisingly for the period, Royal Warriors definitely makes a point of spotlighting it, dragging Yeoh’s femininity front and centre at every opportunity. It’s rare she’s not being showered with roses by unwanted suitors, or diving head-first into the action dressed like a supermodel, serving bloody high-kicks in giant-shoulder-padded jackets or cutesy cashmere cardigans. What’s more unusual (and impressive) is how Yeoh starts to twist and play with that “beautiful but deadly” stereotype the filmmakers seem desperate to cash-in on, digging for moral depth in her detective’s prim-and-proper outlook, and playing all of her will-they-won’t-they romantic dialogue with a knowing, sideways sarcasm. The result is a power and a confidence to her detective that’s totally unmatched in the genre, even from her male counterparts. Yeoh wasn’t just dragging herself out of old archetypes set by an industry stuck in the past, she was giving the entire sandbox greater depth, too.supercop2

So much so that by the early ’90s, things were a little different. After a brief retirement, Yeoh returned with a vengeance and well and truly went for broke, starring opposite Jackie Chan (now the biggest star in the East) in the third part of his own increasingly notorious series of Police Story movies. A film (and franchise) that would well and truly put Hong Kong’s action cinema on the map; her biggest platform yet, making waves all over the world.

Introduced straight-up as Jackie’s superior (an Interpol director, no less), Yeoh’s Jessica Yang is every bit his “super-cop’s” equal; she’s never asked to be anything less than a badass, behind the scenes even famously pushing Chan harder and harder to top her impressive stunt work. And while it is ultimately Chan who nudges out in front as the film’s star and main source of spectacle, it’s Yeoh who steals the movie’s best moment, jumping a speeding motorbike onto a fast-moving train, for real. No wires, or green screens or anything other than pure skill. Something which is even more impressive when you learn that she didn’t even know how to ride said motorbike before taking the whole thing on.

Dubbed simply Supercop when it was finally released in the West several years later, Police Story 3 is a very different beast to anything Chan or Yeoh had tried their hands at prior; a full-on globe-trotting action adventure that plays closer to a Bond movie than a martial arts flick. And with a male-female buddy cop team at its centre – diverting hugely from the all-male Lethal Weapon model that was still reigning supreme in the States – it’s a truly genre-pushing piece of work. Unsurprising then, that it would also become the film to fully open the door to Hollywood for both its stars, and that Yeoh would soon find herself in an actual Bond movie, too. Wherein she would re-write the whole rulebook on the capability of the infamous Bond girl, to much acclaim.

Somewhere in-amongst the big American crossover though, in the depths of the mid-90s, Yeoh would make several more films in Hong Kong, before heading across the pond. Many were reluctant rehashes of what came before; classical kung-fu flicks, super-charged stunt-driven actioners (including a solo Supercop sequel), even a couple of real-world drama biopics. But then there was The Heroic Trio…

HeroicTrio

Directed by the insanely prolific, and now much fabled ‘auteur’ Johnnie To, The Heroic Trio is Yeoh at her most experimental; a dazzlingly barmy comic-book style explosion of exaggerated everything. Even to a genre crowd, it’s a bit much, with huge, operatic set-pieces, numerous child fatalities, and a completely bananas plot involving stolen babies and a deadly invisible cloak. But hidden in amongst all the cartoonish, mile-a-minute violence is arguably the most complicated Michelle Yeoh performance to date. She might be part of the titular trio, but she’s far from heroic.

By today’s standards, The Heroic Trio plays more like a Birds of Prey or a Suicide Squad, with all the attached moral ambiguity of bad people doing good things, and vice versa. And Yeoh’s Ching, introduced as the main villain, before a grand reveal showing her very much in the pocket of the big bad, sits right at the core of it. Few performers could very literally play both sides in the way Yeoh does here, and the way she finds empathy in someone who’s already so far gone, makes her entire performance the very backbone of the whole thing. It’s above all, a very silly movie – a huge amount of fun – but one which would feel so incredibly tasteless without the grounding Yeoh gives it. Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung are exceptional as her sparring partners, but the intricate moral puzzle in the middle of all the madcap action doesn’t work without Yeoh.

As her career in Hollywood has grown and grown (though still, often, with one foot back home), it’s become clearer to a mass audience what a talent Yeoh is, forever mining for something more intricate, even in the most shallow screenplays. But most of all, what pins her to the top of any genre fan’s list of action MVPs, is that she’s made it very deliberately impossible to place her into any one box; an action hero to some, but one who defies traditional attitudes towards gender, physicality and even moral purity.

For all the face-punching and motorcycle-jumping madness that draws us in, what keeps us there is voices like Yeoh’s, an always unpredictable and fascinatingly nuanced force of nature. A true action icon, who understands the genre on a far deeper level than most of us.

Royal Warriors, Police Story 3: Supercop and The Heroic Trio were screened as part of Forbidden World’s Film Festival 2023. For more info on the festival and future events, head to forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk.