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sagaftra.org | Spring 2023 | SAG-AFTRA 63 Michelle Yeoh with her two Actors at the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. hard to believe that she had been waiting for such an opportunity, given her IMDb profile boasts a series of roles that have broken the glass ceiling for Asian women in American and Asian cinema. Yeoh, who began as a contestant in the pageant circuit in her early 20s, got her start in Hong Kong's film industry. She starred and performed her own stunts in a string of Hong Kong martial arts films from the late '80s and early '90s. After briefly retiring in 1987, she returned to the screen to star alongside Jackie Chan in Police Story 3: Supercop (1992). But it would be her first-ever American role as Wai Lin in the James Bond franchise film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) that made her stand out as an example of Asian representation for American audiences. "[The franchise] was very much a man's world: All the guys loved to be James Bond and the women were almost always the Bond girls. But when they came looking for me, they were ready for [a woman] to have much more depth and emotion. I was very blessed that that was [their approach] when they were writing Tomorrow Never Dies," said Yeoh to GQ. Since that time, Yeoh has taken on a vast array of roles, from a successful businesswoman and warrior in the Ang Lee masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) to Eleanor Sung-Young of the summer blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians (2018), as well as credits in the Star Trek and The Mummy franchises. Whether playing the hero or the villain, the noble Starfleet captain or the antagonistic family matriarch, she has expanded Asian presence onscreen and, along the way, earned recognition for her mastery of the craft, including, in 2008, being crowned as Rotten Tomatoes' greatest action heroine of all time. However, for Yeoh, Everything Everywhere has done something incredibly special: Not only has the film demonstrated the marketability of Asian casts, but it has also shown the importance of Asian stories, both great and small. Said Yeoh in a recent interview with CBS Mornings, "What I found so beautiful [about Everything Everywhere] was it gave a voice to a very MAARTEN DE BOER/SHUTTERSTOCK