The author with Michelle Yeoh, New York City, 1995
By Fredric Dannen
One day in 1996 the phone rang in my New York apartment, and the caller identified himself as Peter Chan, a Hong Kong movie director. We had met in Hong Kong a year earlier, when I was researching an article for The New Yorker about the Hong Kong movie business. The South China city is the world’s second-largest exporter of films after the United States, and in the mid-1990s, its studios were turning out about 200 motion pictures a year, in most of the same genres as Hollywood. Peter Chan specialized in urban dramas.
Chan called me that day because he was in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, filming a few scenes for his forthcoming movie, Comrades: Almost a Love Story, and invited me down. When I arrived, he was at a fried chicken restaurant under the elevated subway with two of his stars, Maggie Cheung and Eric Tsang. In Comrades, Tsang, playing a triad, or Chinese mafia boss, is shot dead on a Brooklyn street, and Cheung, playing his girlfriend, identifies his body at a hospital morgue. In Hong Kong, I had befriended Cheung, and interviewed many other movie people whose work I admired, among them actors Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Chow Yun-fat, as well as directors Wong Kar-wai, Tsui Hark, and Ann Hui. But I had never met Eric Tsang, and I took the opportunity to interview him. Maggie Cheung, who had spent part of her childhood in London, offered to translate, but it proved unnecessary.
When I stepped out of the fried chicken joint, a man with a Brooklyn accent stopped me, and, pointing to Cheung, said, “Do you know her?” He explained that he was part of the union crew that Chan had to hire in order to film in Brooklyn, and had never heard of the director or his stars or, for that matter, seen a Hong Kong movie. Before continuing with this anecdote, it is important to point out that union film crew members tend to be congenitally unimpressed by anything. This crewman was astounded by Maggie Cheung. The hospital morgue scene had been filmed earlier that day, and in one extended take she had been asked to display a range of emotions as she identified her boyfriend–an involuntary laugh when the first thing she sees is his Mickey Mouse tattoo, then shock, confusion, ashen grief, and tears. The closeup runs 45 seconds–an eternity–and Cheung required only a single take. All the director had said was “action” and “cut,” and that was it. “I have never seen acting like that in my life,” the crewman told me.
I suspect the man was surprised not merely to have witnessed a great performance from an actor he had never heard of, but an actor who looked like Cheung. She had launched her movie career after placing second in the 1983 Miss Hong Kong Pageant. Jackie Chan had cast her as his girlfriend in his Police Story action series, and it made her famous in Hong Kong, but no one had any idea of her talents as an actor until the director Wong Kar-wai began to put her in dramas. In 2000, she starred in Wong’s In the Mood for Love, now ranked as the fifth-greatest movie of all time in the most recent Sight and Sound poll. Today, a superb performance from Cheung surprises no one.
It has taken the Hong Kong movie star Michelle Yeoh longer to prove her mettle as an actor, but last month, at age 60, she won Best Actress at the Golden Globes for her virtuoso role in the sci-fi comedy-drama Everything Everywhere All At Once, beating out Lesley Manville, Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Emma Thompson. She has been nominated for an Oscar in the same category. For years, the Malaysian-born actress has had two strikes against her being taken seriously–her looks (she won the Miss Malaysia pageant at age 20) and her success as an action star.
And what an action star she was. When I first met her in Hong Kong in December 1994, I had seen her recent movie Supercop, in which she upstages costar Jackie Chan by performing her own hair-raising stunts. In one scene, she hops on a motorbike, chases after a speeding train carrying the bad guys, rides off a steep hill, lands on the train, and ditches the bike on impact. I asked how she prepared for that scene, and she said the weekend before she learned to ride a motorbike–which was not what I had meant.
While in Hong Kong, I routinely dined with her and her friends at the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon, and she would ask whom I had interviewed that day. One evening I arrived from meeting a triad-turned-movie-producer named Chan Chi-ming, who had a reputation for being crazy. Though it was never proven, Chan was a suspect in the murder of Jet Li’s manager after Li refused to act in one of Chan’s movies. Yeoh almost spilled her wine. “Where did you get the nerve to interview him?” she said, which struck me as funny coming from someone who performed stunts that could have killed her. I was never in any danger interviewing Chan Chi-ming.
But people have different definitions of what constitutes nerve. In acting, there is something called theatrical courage, the willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Jackie Chan nearly killed himself doing his own stunts, yet in 1993 he turned down a lead role in Chen Kaige’s masterly Farewell My Concubine because he did not feel comfortable playing a homosexual, and thereby missed his chance to prove that he, too, could be an outstanding dramatic actor.
A famous Hollywood producer–name withheld–once told me, “Michelle Yeoh will never be as big as Jackie Chan.” He was wrong. She showed a different kind of courage, and now she’s bigger.
