Why Michelle Yeoh’s Hollywood movie career was full of false starts, and Tomorrow Never Dies and Memoirs of a Geisha brought fame but no fortune

Hong Kong action heroine Michelle Yeoh, Oscar-winning star of Everything Everywhere All at Once, found Hollywood success after a series of false starts

Her Hollywood debut in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies did not yield any decent offers afterwards, while her turn in Memoirs of a Geisha was mired in controversy

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Pierce Brosnan as Bond and Michelle Yeoh as Bond girl Wai Lin in a still from the James Bond 1997 movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”. Yeoh’s debut Hollywood film did not yield any good offers after it was released. Photo: AP Photo/BMW

Published: 4:15am, 1 Oct 2023Updated: 10:28am, 19 Nov 2023

Michelle Yeoh is now a major Hollywood star, but the Hong Kong action heroine found success in the United States only after travelling a long road littered with false starts.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

All the talk in the late 1990s centred around John Woo Yu-sum and Chow Yun-fat going to Hollywood, but it was Yeoh who made the biggest splash.

For her debut Hollywood role, the Malaysian Chinese actress snagged the part of a leading Bond girl in the 18th James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, playing opposite Pierce Brosnan.

Although Yeoh said she was thrilled to play a Bond girl because she knew it would make her internationally famous, she wanted to do it her way. Bond girls were generally helpless characters whose main aim was to add glamour and act as fodder for 007’s sexual conquests, before being bumped off by the enemy’s goons.

Yeoh, who had a no-nude-scenes clause in her contract, saw it differently. “We were going into the 21st century, and I didn’t want her to just be gorgeous to look at, but smart,” she told the Post. “I wanted her to be intelligent and to be just as smart as Bond.”

Yeoh, who was then managed by Woo and Chow’s powerful manager Terence Chang, was offered the role because a producer had seen her on his son’s videocassette releases of Hong Kong films.