Why Michelle Yeohs Hollywood movie career was full of false starts, and Tomorrow Never Dies and M

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.”

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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.

Yeoh’s role was reportedly relatively marginal in the original script – Bond girls typically just come in and out of the storyline – but was greatly expanded during rehearsals and shooting, when the producers realised they had hired someone with a special skill set.

Brosnan, known to be one of Hollywood’s more affable performers, did not mind when Yeoh’s role was enlarged so that she became his partner in a kind of buddy movie – a first for a woman in a Bond film.

Yeoh’s character only comes into focus in the last third of the film, but when she does, the actress is given a lot to do.

Yeoh plays Wai Lin, a mainland Chinese agent who, with Bond, has been tasked with preventing an evil media baron (Jonathan Pryce) from starting World War III – so that he can use the ensuing chaos to sell more papers.

“I am proud,” she told Asiaweek’s Alison Singh Gee. “This is a great character. Wai Lin is the first Bond girl who is on a par with Bond – someone who can keep up with him mentally and physically.”

The actress is an accomplished stuntwoman as well as a fighter, and wanted to do her own stunts in Tomorrow Never Dies. But because of the concerns of the film’s insurers, she had to sit most of the stunts out, and let her stunt double, Wendy Leech, perform them. If a star gets injured during a shoot, a film sometimes has to shut down while they recover – and that is expensive.

“The producers go, ‘What if she slips, or falls?’ They are very careful about these things. If there’s an accident, it can be disastrous. I keep telling Roger [Spottiswoode, the director], ‘Come on, I can do it, let me do it’, and he’ll say, ‘The producers will kill me if I let you do it’. It’s very limiting,” Yeoh said.

The actress was allowed to film a kung fu fight near the end, in which she disposes of a number of the villain’s goons. Although still shot Hollywood style, the scene has a touch of Hong Kong’s fluid martial arts choreography.

That is because Yeoh suggested that Hong Kong choreographer Philip Kwok Chun-fung and a five-man team should be flown in to work on that scene. “It’s better if you work with people that you are used to working with, as they understand the rhythms and the timing. It’s good that the producers realised this,” Yeoh said.

Yeoh proved an international hit in Tomorrow Never Dies, and at the time it was reported that she was looking at drama, comedy and action roles, including a remake of Woo’s The Killer in which she would play the Danny Lee Sau-yin police officer role.

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But Yeoh later said that all the roles she was offered were too stereotypical to consider. Her next assault on Hollywood would be Ang Lee’s Chinese-language Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Crouching Tiger made Yeoh famous all over again in the US, but it still did not lead to any acceptable Hollywood offers.

The role that she did finally choose, that of a manipulative geisha in Rob Marshall’s 2005 adaptation of Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha, turned out to be controversial.

The film was disliked by her home base of Asian fans, and it did not help her US career move forward, either.

The film’s notoriety was a result of the casting. Three of the four main geishas were played by Chinese actresses – Yeoh, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi. Only Yuki Kudo was Japanese.

In Japan, audiences wondered why the producers had not picked Japanese actresses for the role. In China, where anti-Japanese sentiment was still strong, the authorities were angry that Chinese actresses would stoop to play Japanese characters and, in Zhang’s case, kiss a Japanese actor.

In the US, Asian-Americans felt that the casting was just one more example of Hollywood’s insensitivity towards Asians, noting that, even in the 21st century, producers seemed unable to differentiate between Chinese, Japanese or any other Asians.

To make matters worse, Marshall made all the Japanese characters speak in a kind of awkward Japan-glish, rather than use subtitled Japanese like in The Last Samurai.

Yeoh was caught up in the controversy, and said that she had honestly not thought that the casting would be a problem – she had actually seen Memoirs of a Geisha as a step forward for Asians in Hollywood.

“This is the first time that Chinese actresses have had the chance to be in such a big production,” she told the Post. “And we felt that it would lead to great opportunities for Chinese actresses in the future as well.”

Marshall defended the film by attempting to pass it off as “a fantasy” which was not meant to reflect real geisha life, and said that he had simply picked the best actresses for the role.

The controversy aside, Yeoh, Zhang and Li all turned in highly respectable performances. Li – who learned English for the role – was catty and fiery, while Yeoh was a picture of restraint.

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But once again, acceptable offers did not come Yeoh’s way. Following Memoirs of a Geisha, Yeoh – who had performed in the drama The Soong Sisters back home – noted that the response was often surprise that she could act dramatically as well as ride motorcycles and kick people.

Yeoh did not truly return to the Hollywood limelight until TV’s Star Trek: Discovery and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians over 10 years later.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.

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